


Smoke and Mirrors

by batonblue



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety Disorder, Brimel, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Malcolm Bright Needs a Hug, Malcolm Bright Whump, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Misunderstandings, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Triggers, Violence, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-01-30 10:08:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 75,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21426457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batonblue/pseuds/batonblue
Summary: JT Tarmel is warming up to Malcolm.  Navigating their developing relationship is tough for both of them.((Warnings for dark content, violence, and so many mental health triggers I can't list them all.))Whump. H/C. M/M. Slow burn.  Eventual Malcolm/JT.  Because I can.
Relationships: Gil Arroyo & Malcolm Bright, Malcolm Bright & Ainsley Whitly, Malcolm Bright & Dani Powell, Malcolm Bright & JT Tarmel, Malcolm Bright & Jessica Whitly, Malcolm Bright & Martin Whitly, Malcolm Bright/JT Tarmel
Comments: 569
Kudos: 503





	1. Chapter One

_ Bright _.

It suits him, JT finds himself thinking.

That’s what the kid is. Loud, radiant, all manic energy and grinding gears and that big brain steamrolling away like an engine always demanding more fuel than you’ve got in the tank.

It shines out of him like a floodlight through waxed paper. Beams of light. Terrifying and hypnotic.

And he’s not sure when it happened but at some point all the same things JT used to hate about the kid have begun to intrigue him. Maybe it’s just animal magnetism, a force of nature stronger than the prejudices so deeply ingrained in him by years of service. That instinct that draws the natural protector in him to this mess of a kid. 

To ask Malcolm, he doesn’t need protecting. To ask anyone else, he’s a walking textbook case of masochism and self-destruction. JT is in the latter camp.

The kid’s brilliant of course, genius even. Sharp as a whip. Vulnerable and fragile in dichotomous ways that pull at tug at each other like rolling tides in the harbor. Stubborn and impulsive and reckless and everything JT has always hated most. 

There’s no order to him, or at least none that he can sort out, and things that don’t make sense have always irritated him. 

Gil compared the kid to a Rubik’s cube once. _ He’s not an easy guy to explain. _

For some reason that stuck in JT’s brain, and he thinks Gil’s wrong, maybe for the first time. If Malcolm is a Rubik’s cube then it’s the kind that has twenty sides instead of six, all made of mirrors and cracked glass. 

Bright confuses him.

The name suits him. 

**.**

It’s almost midnight and the team is at a bar they’ve never been to. 

It’s a little too well-lit, a little too close to uptown. JT can’t get comfortable. He’s abandoned Gil and Dani at the booth with Malcolm in favor of resting his elbows on the counter at the bar, a half-empty glass between his palms.

He’s got a good spot here at the back of the room, where the L-shaped counter curves around to run parallel to the back wall. He can see all the exits from where he’s sitting; he can hear Dani and Gil laughing. Has a good view of the bar stretching down in front of him and away to his right. It’s no Billymark’s, but it’s not grating on his nerves like it was an hour ago. 

Then again, liquor might have had something to do with that.

He’s feeling antisocial, shut-down. The kind of mood that settles on his shoulders after a too-long week. Too much running, too many hits taken on the proverbial chin. He’s sluggish and surly and not remotely in the mood for company, though he was even less inclined to argue about it when Dani dragged them out.

The dying optimist in him hopes they’re smart enough to let him be. To leave him to sit in the white noise of inebriation and muted football games on bright televisions. 

He hears light footsteps approaching him, and he’s been around long enough to know Malcolm doesn’t usually walk like that. He’s making noise, scuffing his heels, giving JT heads-up that he’s about to have company. Welcome or not. 

And isn’t that just like him, always working, always profiling the people around him. JT wonders if Bright even knows he’s doing it, or if it’s so second-nature to him by now that it just happens, just translates the world around him into another language as natural as breathing.

Bright leans his elbows on the back of the barstool beside him. He smells like scotch, and old notes of what JT can only guess is an obscenely expensive cologne. He wishes it was tacky or overbearing but it isn’t. If he’s being honest, it smells damn good. 

The bigger man stares stubbornly at the door and mentally wills the kid not to open his mouth. 

“You wanna do shots?”

That breaks the stubborn spell pretty quick. JT turns and gives him an incredulous once over, all skin and bones in a wool coat. 

“Yeah don’t take this the wrong way, kid, but that ain’t a fair fight.”

Malcolm laughs, and it’s a breathy, awkward apology all rolled into a shrug of the shoulders and a tipped head. JT watches the hair that falls into Malcolm’s face, the long, restless fingers that dart up to comb it back. 

“You’re right,” the kid says plainly, inviting himself to a seat on the empty barstool next to him. He’s a little too close for comfort, crowding in a little more than he probably means to. JT finds he’s just buzzed enough not to care. 

“Truth is I saw you sitting over here, glaring at the brazilian cherry and thought maybe you needed a distraction,” Malcolm says plainly, holding up his own glass like that’s some kind of explanation. “Or a drink.”

“Maybe I’m just thinking, going over the case,” JT grumbles back, but there’s no real animosity there. Bright certainly can’t help being the only one dumb enough to approach the big cop when he’s drinking. It’s not his fault he doesn’t possess the barest sense of self-preservation.

“Well, you know what they say,” Malcolm’s eyes sparkle, “all work and no play... Etcetera.”

That used to annoy JT too. When the kid did that cut-and-paste euphemism bullshit, like he’s reading lines off a cue card trying to fit in. It’s another little thing that somehow fell off the list, going from infuriating to _ that’s just Bright _ too fast to catch. 

The bigger man huffs out a breath and shakes his head, finishing off his glass and staring at the hundreds of bottles lined up behind the bar. He’s not going over the case. He’s not going over anything; he’s just planning his next drink. 

He wonders if that’s written on his face clear as day, headlines for the profiler. Always at work.

The bigger man is eyeballing the Balvenie, wondering if it’s worth the splurge, wondering if he’ll be sober enough to switch back to Jack after a drink or two. He feels the weight of a too-direct gaze on him. Turns to catch eyes watching his. Damn those eyes are blue.

“You’re still here,” less a question than a statement.

“Yes,” Bright finally turns his shoulders away and slouches onto the bar, mimicking JT. “I am.”  
  


“Alright,” the cop grumbles, raising a hand to flag down the bartender. “If you’re gonna stick around you better start drinkin’.”

He pretends not to catch the blinding grin that breaks over Malcolm’s face at that. He pretends it doesn’t warm him up a little bit that it’s aimed at him.

**.**

  
  


“Blue raspberry.”

JT slowly lifts his head from the body in front of him, blue latex gloves both wrist-deep in the John Doe’s chest as he holds open the cavity for the rebar to be swabbed by crime scene techs.

The big cop is kneeling on a folded tarp in the woods in central park. Their latest case is stripped naked and bent backwards over a cement pylon, three rebar stakes protruding from a flayed-open chest cavity. A location remote enough that the body hadn’t been found for several days, paired with the too-obvious evidence that wildlife had already made off with the internal organs makes the day bad enough. 

Coming to the slow realization that the body had been cemented in place is building a slow headache at the base of his skull. 

_ When it rains, it fuckin pours. _

Bright is standing over him, deep black bruises hanging like smudges of coal under his eyes. He has a lollipop in his hand. 

JT blinks at him slowly, wondering if this is the day the kid has finally lost his marbles completely. It only seemed like a matter of time.

“What?”

Malcolm holds up the sucker with an awkward shrug, his eyes shining brighter than usual. JT wonders how long it’s been since he slept.

“Blue raspberry,” Malcolm repeats himself, looking immensely proud. Like that’s supposed to mean something.

“I’m a little fuckin busy, Bright,” the cop says slowly, like he’s talking to a child. 

“Ah, yes I can see that,” Malcolm seems wholly unperturbed by the carnage a few inches away from his wingtip shoe. He steps forward and leans down to gently tuck the candy into JT’s jacket pocket. 

The cop rolls his eyes upwards, unable to physically resist the unwanted gift with his hands occupied. He forces himself to let a long breath out through his nose, teeth grinding. He’s saved from coming up with an answer to the bizarre situation—or not so bizarre, when you consider who’s involved—when Malcolm rambles on.

“I just, you know, noticed you didn’t try the root beer flavor right off; you put it in your inside jacket pocket but you ate it at the station later while you were working on reports. And you gave the cherry one to Edrisa later, but you _ do _always eat the blue razz right away.”

JT is glaring daggers at the kid. Anyone else would have withered under the scrutiny. 

“So I made sure to get you the right one this time,” Malcolm finishes with a crooked grin from ear to ear.

For a moment JT is reminded of sitting shoulder to shoulder at a bar on the west side, half-drunk on a whiskey tab Bright had discreetly picked up for him at the end of the night. The kid rambling on about Oedipal complexes and some paper he had just finished reading on the pre-frontal cortex. That same shit-eating grin.

“Oh, is that a spleen?” 

The moment is broken as Bright tugs on gloves and crouches across from him, all focus once again. 

JT stares at him, watches him bicker with Dani when she appears to shoo him away. Watches shining blue eyes travel in little grid search patterns over the nameless corpse, the gears in that giant, messed-up brain clicking and whirring like a computer about to overheat.

“Where’d you get the candy, Bright?” He can’t resist asking after he thinks it over for a few minutes. Mostly, it’s the mental picture of Malcolm striding into a convenience store for a family-size bag of lollipops that’s shorting his brain out. 

“My therapist,” Malcolm fires back with the kind of disarming honesty JT really should be used to by now.

He isn’t.

“She’s got a whole jar in her office; all different flavors,” Malcolm rambles on while he examines the curve of bloody rebar, “they’re to help kids feel better.”

JT bites his tongue after that. It’s easier not to think about Bright’s continued struggle with his own mental health, and one that’s he’s so catastrophically bad at hiding that he doesn’t generally try. If you ask him he talks about it. If you stick around long enough you’ll see it for yourself. 

The bigger man remembers the first time he worked with Malcolm, the time after as he handed out candy to the team. Back then he’d thought the kid was the peak of arrogance and condescension, another expensive degree in a suit swooping in to flex on the beat cops.

He thought of how over time, JT had finally come to see these awkward little exchanges for what they were: an outcast desperate to fit in, to offer little slivers of companionship and camaraderie as a literal olive branch in a world he knew how to observe, but not to navigate. An ostracized loner hungry for human connection without having the first clue how to initiate it. 

As bad as he is at showing it, Bright just wants to belong.

Hours later, JT drives back to the station in an unmarked Crown Vic. He eats the lollipop on the drive and makes sure to ditch his trash in the lobby before heading upstairs.

**.**

  
  


JT likes order in his life. In cop work, like in the military, there’s a structure to everything by design. There are rules and policies and laws to follow. Consequences for failing to follow those rules. Always a guidebook. Always parameters. 

It’s the only way to get a grip on the chaos, he thinks. Maybe some kind of hyper-obsessive need for control anywhere you can get it, because out _ there, _ there’s just so little control to be had. Control what you can. The rules are there for a reason.

He thinks that’s exactly what rubbed him wrong about Bright from the jump. 

The kid’s smart. He _ knows _ the rules. He could probably rattle them off verbatim, if he ever bothered to read them in the first place. But he consciously knows, he’s been told or shown or commanded at some point. 

He just doesn’t give a shit.

“We’re not supposed to be here,” JT hisses from behind his balaclava, his breath frosting out through the neoprene into the frigid air. The moisture from his lungs is collecting on the inside layer, leaving his lips damp.

“Almost done,” Bright says back in a half-whisper. Even in the dim light from JT’s flashlight, his eyes are glowing with that familiar madness. Fixation, obsession, whatever you want to call it. 

This time, the kid managed to suck JT into the insanity with him. Like catching a virus, the cop had let that manic passion get under his skin and in so doing, had somehow been dragged into a stakeout-turned-secret mission that was quickly venturing into dangerous territory. 

“This is private property,” the bigger man goes on, his voice low and deep in his chest, thinly veiling frustration, “we don’t have a warrant, we don’t have probable cause, we don’t have _ backup— _”

“Well it’s a good thing I don’t need any of those things,” Malcolm is still being entirely too flippant about the situation, “I’m a private citizen.”

“Acting on direction from an officer of the law!” 

Even as he says it JT knows that’s bullshit too. At no point had he ever been doing the directing here. Malcolm is on a mission and he’s simply getting pulled along for the ride. 

“The killer was using a unique concrete mixture…. I mean he’s hand-grinding limestone and oyster shells; it’s a primitive technique probably to avoid the purchases being tracked. Mission killers, they like to have some sort of signature, a ritual that fulfills that inner compulsion.”

“What? How do you know all this?” JT tugs down the stifling cloth from his mouth. He immediately regrets it as the freezing temperatures hit damp skin.

He watches Malcolm give up digging through the frozen dirt with a scrapped shingle and move on to using his hands, frustrated by the slow process. He didn’t bring gloves, or boots or a coat thick enough to stave off the November chill, and JT hates that he notices all of this now. That it bothers him.

“I mean it’s common knowledge; cement and gravel are the key components of —” 

“No!” JT feels frustration and anxiety bubbling in his chest like a volcano preparing to erupt, “how do you know he’s making it himself? Did you already get the lab report, because Gil is gonna kill you if you snagged that without running it by him!”

“Relax, I already talked to Gil. He told me I wasn’t allowed to come out here alone.”

That does it. The cop feels a vein popping out in his forehead. He forces himself to breathe evenly.

“So you specifically asked Gil. And he said not to come.”

“Yeah,” Malcolm huffs, winded from exertion. He nods confidently and spares a quick glance up that’s probably meant to be reassuring, “he said not _ alone _. And I’m not. I’ve got you.”

JT’s chest seizes up in an unexpected way, like he got kicked in the chest and lost all his breath for a minute. It’s unexpected and he fights it down like indigestion. 

“How’d you even know I would go along with all this,” he can’t resist grumbling, hoping he sounds steadier than he feels. 

“Your sense of loyalty to Gil and the chain of command sometimes comes into direct competition with your inherent need, the good old ‘serve and protect’ bit,” Malcolm is talking on autopilot, seemingly oblivious to JT’s shellshocked expression. 

“It’s a cop thing, I mean yeah, but it’s even more embedded in the psyche of ex-military, veterans and the like,” Bright’s voice is picking up pace in the thin air, and JT can finally hear the shake in it that betrays the kid’s complete lack of reaction to the cold. “The rank and file process so deeply ingrained, brainwashed even, in the military structure, that the only opportunity for self-expression comes in the development of bonds between soldiers. Like those stories when soldiers are ordered to retreat but they go back anyways for a wounded comrade—”

It’s at about this point that Malcolm finally looks up, like he just remembered who he was talking to, and something dark in JT’s expression brought him up short. It’s like watching a freight train hit a brick wall, and Malcolm blinks for a moment before staring down at his hands, dirty and numb. 

The cop knows he should be pissed. By the look on his face, Bright knows it too. But somewhere deep under the surface level of the irritation he wants to feel (because god dammit Malcolm is _ always _ working, always psychoanalyzing him, always profiling…) there’s something else entirely. 

“You do this to Gil, huh?” JT finally breaks the tense silence. “To Dani?”

Bright doesn’t play dumb, but he also doesn’t have the grace to look apologetic. If anything, he looks a little embarrassed. It doesn’t seem to fit. 

“No,” Malcolm says plainly, and he’s back to that raw version of ugly truths, spit out like they don’t mean anything, don’t weigh anything. “Gil talks to me, tells me whatever I wanna know. He understands why. Dani’s told me some too, but mostly reluctantly. But you don’t.”

Breathing out clouds of fog in the freezing air, JT and Bright stare at each other. There’s less than a yard between them, kneeling on the leaves and underbrush with a dim yellow light glowing between them. 

“I don’t… what?” JT is going to make him say it if it kills them both. If they have to sit on that cold ground and freeze to death before morning. 

There’s a glimpse of something that flickers across Bright’s eyes, almost too fast to pin down. It’s wild and feral and almost scared. That can’t be right. 

It’s gone before he can breathe.

“I—I just don’t know that much about you,” it’s a poor bluff, but not untrue enough that JT can call him out on it. “My brain just does that, you know. I’m not trying to be intrusive or anything—”  
  


“But you are, Bright,” JT says sharper than he means to. Maybe it’s the cold cramping up his muscles or the ache in his bones or the frustration at this kid for all the ways he’s managed to get under his skin for so long, but it sounds wrong. Harsh. 

“You are being intrusive, you get that? I’m not a suspect. I’m not a profile. So stay the fuck out of my head, and _ do your job _.” 

The second the words are out of his mouth, JT knows he’s said the wrong thing. He sees the rejection hit Bright like a slap to the face, because that’s exactly what it was. Rejection. And JT isn’t sure how it happened, or why. Doesn’t understand what’s going on in his own head, or why it came out like that. 

Malcolm opens his mouth like he’s going to try to respond, closes it again. 

JT feels his heart sink down into his stomach. Feels cracks that weren’t there before. He’s damaged something he can’t fix with words. He doesn’t know how to start. 

“We—Gil and I came by earlier, friendly stop in to talk to the foreman. No evidence of the compound, on first look, even though it’s a construction site... We just need to find shells somewhere on the property, limestone, a mixing vat. The ingredients...”

JT is pretty sure Malcolm is back to rattling on about the case at hand as a defense mechanism, and he’s relieved to let him have it. To distract them both from whatever just happened between them.

He can bluff, he thinks. He can play along, even if he’s pretty certain that if this keeps up, he’s going to be turning gray before he hits forty. 

“Jesus Christ just—hurry it up.”

Little more is said between them; Bright drags his unwilling partner in subterfuge to a handful of locations around the site before they hit paydirt. 

“Fuckin oysters, seriously?” JT shines the dimming circle of light on the tightly packed dirt, thin layers over a mess of broken black shells. 

“Everything fits the profile,” Malcolm is muttering to himself, battered hands turning over pieces of shells. 

JT sees smears of blood on pale skin and his stomach flips. Malcolm’s fingers are cut and bleeding and he doesn’t seem to feel it in the cold. 

“It’s like 12 degrees out here, Bright.”

That seems to do the trick. Sometimes words aren’t enough to snap him out of it, as JT has learned the hard way over the painstaking weeks and months of their mismatched teamwork.

“Pockets,” Malcolm is already buzzing along at the speed of light, following the rabbit trail of his own brain down paths only he can see. His hands are red and bruised and caked in dirt as he peels up shells, handing them by the muddy handful across to JT, and for some reason that’s all the cop can focus on. 

“Wait—pockets?” The bigger man echoes dumbly, brain short-circuiting for a beat at the idea of stuffing half-rotted shells into his leather jacket. 

“Unless you brought a bucket,” Bright is already shoving bits of shell and dirt into his wool coat, and he doesn’t seem concerned in the least about his future dry cleaning bill. 

The cop swears under his breath and follows his lead, grimacing at the smell. 

“This is the weirdest damn stakeout of my life, I swear to god…”  
  


Malcolm’s head is up, eerie blue eyes fixed on something just over the cop’s shoulder. 

“Would you believe me if I told you it’s about to get weirder?”

JT goes still, ears open and eyes searching in the darkness as he looks back through the murky woods in the direction they came from.

Dogs barking. The distant crack of branches snapping under heavy boots. Flashlight beams blinking through the trees in sweeping arcs.

“Bright,” JT grabs his arm and hauls the smaller man to his feet, “time to run.”

**.**

  
  


Closing a case never feels quite as definitive as it should. It always feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting to be pushed off and realizing it’s never going to happen. Waiting for the drop. Ready for it. Thinking deep down, that it’s going to be a relief.

It’s not. Never is. It’s always on to the next drop. The next cliff. One case blurs into the next and the sense of accomplishment JT remembers from his early days in the Major Crimes unit is gone.

He’s standing over a smear of blood in the kitchen. Point of contact. There’s a trail of crimson leading into the master bedroom, the body dragged across marble floors. A month of rent in this place probably costs more than JT makes in a year. 

He hasn’t had a moment alone with Bright since their mad dash through the woods two days ago. Hasn’t had a chance to make sure things are still _ normal _ between them, even if he’s no longer sure exactly what that looks like.

The cop knows Malcolm has arrived by the sound of Edrisa’s voice somewhere behind him in the entryway. He doesn’t even need to turn and look. The octaves hike up and the tones drop like she’s doing her best impression of a soap opera actress. It’s almost nauseating, and if he’s honest, it sparks something ugly in his gut that feels too much like jealousy to make any sense. 

He doesn’t turn around, but he can see Malcolm in the reflection of stainless steel in the mini bar. The profiler takes a halting step towards the kitchen, and JT feels his pulse pick up. 

There’s a funny little flutter in his stomach and he thinks for a blessed moment that maybe he didn’t ruin it. Maybe Bright shook it off, as stubborn as ever. Wiped the whole disastrous conversation from his memory. Selfishly, he hopes so. 

He watches the thin figure falter, pause. Bright is holding lollipops in his right hand, bright against white bandages. He stands there for what feels like an eternity, and then turns away. 

JT listens to Bright walk down the hall and start making smalltalk with Gil, the techs. The same excited chattering he used to spew from somewhere annoyingly close to JT’s shoulder. In a hundred years, he never thought he’d miss it.

Like a robot, hollow and aching, he forces himself to move. To _ just do his job _ like he told Bright to do a few days ago. No use looking like a hypocrite now. 

They’re on scene for six hours but it feels like years. He wonders, not for the first time, how Bright does it. Trucks through endless exhausting hours combing over crime scenes and manilla folders and stacks of photos, running solely on caffeine and willpower. 

Battling other men’s demons during the day and his own at night. 

It’s not the first time he’s tried to avoid acknowledging that what he feels for the kid these days is something altogether too close to concern, to _ caring _. With a note of bitterness, he reminds himself that might not be his problem anymore. Whatever strange, unsteady bridge they’d been building appeared to be in flames now. 

He walks to his car in an exhausted daze, fishing into his pocket for keys. 

There’s a white and blue bit of plastic snapping in the gusty wind. A wrapped lollipop jammed into the driver’s side weatherstripping of his Crown Vic. 

Feeling like he may be suffering from sleep deprivation more than he originally thought, JT walks up and pulls it out. Blue raspberry. 

It’s such a little thing. Almost nothing in fact, he reminds himself But the hole in his chest suddenly doesn’t feel as deep, the weight of the day not quite as heavy. 

Glancing around for witnesses, JT lets out a long sigh and peels the wrapper off. He pops the candy in his mouth and drops into the driver’s seat. 

He waits until he’s pulled away from the crime scene and well around the corner before he lets himself smile. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally started this show over the weekend and honestly... I've never jumped on a fandom bandwagon so fast in my life. Obsessed is a super mild word for where I'm at right now. Please drop thoughts, comments, suggestions, and fic reccs in the comments. I need more of this show in my life.


	2. Chapter Two

It’s not entirely accurate to say that things go back to normal between them.

The second JT catches himself even thinking the word  _ normal _ when it comes to Bright he starts to wonder if he’s losing it himself. 

The cop makes an effort to be a little less caustic, a little less gruff when the kid is around. He curbs back on his sharp commentary and it’s not hard. Not like he thought it was going to be.

What  _ is  _ hard is pretending to miss the shadows that somehow grow deeper every day under bright blue eyes, the gaunt cheekbones and neglected stubble. The fact that sometimes Bright shows up earlier than anyone has a right to, still wearing the same clothes he’d been in when they’d parted ways the previous night at the precinct. 

Glimpses. Bits of stained glass all cobbled up and reflecting. Shaking hands and haunted eyes.

If he didn’t know any better, he would have pegged the kid for a junkie, ten times out of ten. The alternative, knowing he’s not sleeping, knowing he’s facing off against monsters only he can see, is somehow worse. JT knows how to deal with junkies. He doesn’t know the first thing about…  _ this. _

And he’s not sure when he started wanting to.

It’s easy to watch the kid slide downhill when he’s paying attention, and harder to ignore it than it used to be. And maybe he always noticed and always ignored it, because there’s nothing new there. The kid is still jumping at shadows, zoning out, clenching his fists to tuck them into his pockets with a smile and a distracting bit of bizarre trivia.

The difference now is that it actually bothers him to see it. 

**.**

“You’re worried about him,” Dani says out of the blue.

JT blinks himself back to reality and lowers the beer he’s been nursing for the better part of half an hour. 

They’re back at Billymark’s; Dani and Gil both shared their partner’s general distaste for the swankier bar uptown that never quite felt right. Malcolm isn’t with them tonight, but he’d made it clear he didn’t share their strong opinions on proper watering holes. On the odd occasions that he agrees to tag along with them for a post-shift drink, he seems more than content to sip on house whiskey and enjoy their company. 

“Who,” he tries to play dumb, knowing it’s a futile effort. 

Dani gives him a look that’s a little too condescending for his tastes, and he scowls as he goes back to his beer. He takes a long swig, trying not to grimace at the realization that it’s gone warm in his hand. 

“Want my take on it?”

“No.”

She pretends not to hear him, which is probably wise. He does want her take on it, but his pride won’t let him take that hit.

“He likes you.”

It takes a lot of effort not choke on his drink, and he deliberately sets the newly-empty bottle down on the mismatched cardboard coaster before waving to the bartender. 

Dani presses on, matter-of-fact as always. “He’s going out of his way to get to know you. He’s trying, that’s all I’m saying.”

“He’s  _ profiling _ me, Dan,” an old note of bitterness creeps back into his voice. 

JT nods his thanks as his lukewarm bottle is replaced with a blessedly cold one. He knows even that is giving too much away, telling too much. Letting on that it bothers him like it does is an admission he wasn’t willing to make. 

“You givin’ him much of a choice?”

He turns to raise an eyebrow at her. “Last I remember, he did the same thing to you once. Really pissed you off.”

She shrugs in agreement. “Yeah, but I didn’t know him all that well.”   
  


“And you do now?”

“Better. Well enough to know when he’s working a case and when he’s trying to make friends.”

That gives him pause. He takes a long swig of his beer and thinks on that, wondering if it really is that simple. Thinks of what Malcolm said to him back at the construction site, about Gil understanding why. For the first time, he latches on to those words. Tries to interpret them. 

“I don’t know about all that,” he frowns incredulously, wondering how to vocalize his concerns without sounding like he’s gone soft.

“You ever had a dog?”

He bristles at that, recognizing the bait for what it is. 

“You know I was a handler overseas, Dani.”

She doesn’t look apologetic. He wonders if she got that from Bright, or if it’s the other way around. 

“We always had pitties. Big dogs, y’know. Cause they looked mean, yeah, but they’re sweethearts.”

He blinks at her, wondering if she’s approaching a point or just changing the subject completely. 

She sighs and turns around so her back is against the bartop, tilting her chin towards him. She’s younger than he is, but at the moment he feels like he’s about to be scolded by a grade school teacher. 

“It’s like with dogs, is what I’m saying. You know that dog is never gonna speak your language, right? So you learn theirs. You learn how to tell when they’re happy or sad or scared, or whatever. You build trust with them because you understand them.”   
  


“If you’re trying to draw a parallel here, you’re way off mark,” he chuckles mirthlessly into his beer. “Ain’t nobody ever gonna understand what’s goin’ on in that brain.”

“I mean, you probably got that right. But you can learn to speak his language, can’t you?”

He pauses, thinking that over. 

“He’s trying to be your friend, Tramel,” she leans a little closer to click her own beer against his, “don’t be a dumbass.”

She leaves him with that, making her way across the bar to the table where Gil is catching up with a handful of boots he recognized from another precinct. JT watches with casual disinterest, knowing Gil never would have gone over there to socialize if Bright had come with them. He would have stayed with the kid, the son he never had. Keeping him in sight as much as he could, keeping an eye on him without making it too obvious. 

He wonders if that’s Gil speaking Malcolm’s language. Wonders if maybe he’s the one behind the curve here, after all. Even Dani, little Miss Straight-Up, Miss Take-No-Shit, seems to have unlocked that Pandora’s box better than JT has managed to. 

He’s surprised and a little disturbed to realize that irks him. It reminds him of how he felt listening to Edrisa’s disastrous flirting, watching the gentle smiles Malcolm always uses to make her feel better about it when they inevitably fall flat. 

Bright’s language, he thinks distantly, is his work. Profiling. Taking apart human behavior like a puzzle and rearranging the pieces in a way that makes sense to him. Emotion, instinct, need, all becoming clinical elements. 

JT’s not a profiler. 

He can’t read people the way Bright can, and that’s a tough pill to swallow because back when he was a beat cop he’d thought he was pretty good at that. Seeing the lies, the nerves, the coiled spring when a snake was about to strike. 

Taking apart a human psyche from the outside in, building a profile from bits and pieces of violence… that’s a whole new level. 

He thinks back on the way their relationship has evolved over the past six months, from a tense reluctance to share space to an odd kind of harmony. Thinks of all the times he’d been irritated at Bright for trying to peek into his life without permission or invitation… Thinks that what he read as an invasion of privacy was maybe just an expression of interest and a disjointed attempt to make some kind of tentative human connection.

His phone dings, a quiet sound swallowed up in the chorus of raucous noise around him. Relieved by the momentary distraction, he sets his beer down and fishes the device out of his pocket. 

It’s a text from Dani, and he shoots her a withering glare across the crowded bar. She holds up her phone and mouths a  _ you’re welcome _ before turning back to Gil.

Breathing out through his nose, he hits the notification with his thumb and sees that she’s sent him an address. Somewhere on the east side of town, no context. He blinks at it before a moment before it clicks, and shakes his head.

He finishes his beer.

**.**

  
  


JT is standing outside what might possibly be the ugliest door he’s ever laid eyes on in his life and for some unknown reason, he’s nervous as hell. He has a twelve pack of Lager in his hand and a brown paper bag tucked under his elbow, because he doesn’t know if Malcolm drinks beer but if he does, he’d put money on it that it’s not gonna be Bud Light. 

There’s a light on in the loft overhead; he can see that much from the street. There’s not much else to give anything away, let alone definitively indicate that anyone lives here. He’s half-tempted to text Dani and make sure she’d sent him the right address, but he throws that plan out the window pretty quick. For some reason he doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing why he’d left early. 

Somehow, he thinks she already knows. 

When he works up the courage to hit the buzzer, his heart is in his throat and he’s trying to figure out what he’s going to say if the kid actually answers. He’s half-hoping he won’t.

As it turns out he’s spared the agony of reciting any of the hundred options swarming through his head. The door buzzes once and clicks open without commentary.

The cop only hesitates for a moment before stepping inside. He takes the stairs up and lets himself in at the top. 

If anyone told him a few months ago that he’d ever be standing in Bright’s apartment, wielding alcohol like a peace offering, he’d have laughed them out of town.

Malcolm is nowhere in sight, and JT takes the opportunity to study his surroundings. It’s a large space, punctuated modestly with plain furniture pieces and modern industrial hardware. The kind of unimposing abstract art on the walls you’d find in a hotel. A big bed low to the ground with grey blankets across the room under the window. Bare and largely impersonal.

There’s a bird chirping somewhere in the apartment and that throws him for a loop until he spots the cage. Figures the guy would have some kind of weird pet. 

He thinks if he had Bright’s brain, he’d be able to draw more conclusions from what he’s seeing. Do some kind of mental workup to figure things out. Instead he’s left floundering with nothing to go on, standing by the door like an idiot hoping he doesn’t look as out of place as he feels. 

“I told you mother, I’m fine,” Bright patters down the stairs and rounds the corner, tugging on a shirt as he goes. He pulls up short when he spots JT.

“Strike one,” the cop tries for humor. It falls flat.

“Oh—sorry, I…” For possibly the first time since JT’s known him, Bright is struggling for words. He looks so taken off guard it would be comical under other circumstances. A deer in the headlights.

The cop is momentarily stunned by how  _ bad _ the kid looks. Like a cancer patient or some kind of holocasut survivor. All pale lines and dark shadows. The same red flags of declining health JT was able to ignore under the light of day are screaming at him now. 

He fights the urge to comment. Bright’s a grown man, and he doubtless hears it enough. It’s not his place, he tells himself. 

“You busy?”

Malcolm twists his hands, rubs his palms down the wrinkled fabric of his t-shirt. Pastes on a smile that manages to look self-deprecating. He gestures around to his empty apartment.

JT takes that as an  _ obviously not. _

“I was kind of a dick the other night,” the cop doesn’t bother with pleasantries, goes straight for the throat of the issue. If he doesn’t get it out now, he’s worried he might lose his nerve. 

The statement is unexpected to them both. JT’s not the type to apologize, and he reads that understanding like a news ticker scrolling across a screen. Across Bright’s face, as he processes a situation in which neither man ever expected to find themselves. 

That’s something that used to rub him wrong, too. 

You don’t wear your heart on your sleeve like that, not in this line of work. You cover up, stay strong at all costs. Play it close to the vest. Nobody gets to know what you’re thinking; you don’t let on that anything bothers you. Ever. 

For a guy with a closet full of skeletons, always screaming at the doors, clawing their way out, Bright’s pretty terrible at that. 

“I’m here to apologize, alright?”

If he’s going in, he may as well go all the way. Headfirst, making blunt admissions that hurt his pride. He squares his shoulders and forces himself not to be the one to break eye contact.

“See I was trying to figure out how to apologize to  _ you _ ,” Malcolm laughs nervously, hands pressed together like a prayer as he can’t seem to figure out what to do with himself. 

He’s nervous too, the cop realizes. Maybe he thought JT came here to fight, or to rage and rant about respecting boundaries and keeping work at work.

“Don’t make it awkward,” JT huffs, setting the beer on the counter with newfound confidence. He’s not sure how he found himself with the upper hand here, but he’s not gonna lie and say he isn’t enjoying it. 

“Well, can’t make any promises,” the nerves are slowly bleeding out of the kid and that’s something new, too. “Making things awkward is listed as a life skill on my resume.” 

“Beer,” JT pops open the cardboard tab, then gestures to the bottle. “Whiskey. This is how grown-ass men settle their differences, right?”

Malcolm looks incredibly small for a moment, standing barefoot in the massive expanse of his own loft. He looks lost and JT hates it.

“I—thanks,” he says blankly, staring at the case of beer on his counter like it’s something he’s never seen before.

“Hey,” JT interrupts him, and his stomach does that funny flip again when the kid looks up at him. Those eyes are strangely unnerving. “Stop trying to figure it out and just have a beer, okay?”   
  


Malcolm nods slowly, sighing and making a visible effort to shake the tension out of his shoulders. He pulls an apologetic face and those eyes are back on him. 

“Fair enough. Can I break this open instead?” He taps the bottle of whiskey with two fingers.

JT resists the urge to grin, knowing he’d already made a step towards speaking Bright’s language with his choice in liquor. A small step. It feels like a victory. 

“Well it ain’t gonna drink itself.”

“Very true,” that restless energy is back in full motion as Malcolm beelines around the counter and pulls a glass out of an open-face cupboard. 

He pauses, picks up a second glass, shoots the cop an uncertain look.

JT nods at him, and is rewarded with a wicked smile. He never thought having that aimed his way could have this kind of effect on him, but he’s proving himself wrong a lot these days. 

**.**

They’re both three sheets to the wind by midnight.

JT is sprawled out on the floor with his back against the couch. Bright is sitting barefoot and cross legged on the cushions behind him, and naturally it hadn’t taken him long to dig out a stack of case files and drag the other man into long, and possibly overly-passionate debate on what amounted to mostly cold cases.

The last thing the bigger man wants to do after work is  _ talk  _ about work, but he makes a point of being gracious this time around and he’s not entirely disinterested. It didn’t take long to conclude that the kid’s fixation on the old cases circles around finding more of his father’s potential victims. Most of the cases he’s brought up are decades old.

They don’t talk about the strained argument that lead them here, and it’s relieving that their stilted apologies can be put behind them in exchange for drunken mutual understanding. 

Neither of them can track where they left their glasses so they’ve taken to passing the bottle back and forth between them. The upside is convenience; the downside is a complete lack of restraint. 

The cop is a lot more intoxicated than he planned on getting, and Malcolm seems more than happy to keep drinking with him. Momentum kind of built up from there. 

JT hasn’t had anything like this in a long time. Just sharing space with someone and shooting the shit. No looking over his shoulder in a crowded bar, or worrying about the tab or his ride home. It’s both casual and strangely intimate in a way that reminds him how isolated his life has become as a whole. 

Work. Take the worst parts of the day with you to the bar or the gym, let it bleed out. Shuck it off at the door and fall into bed alone. 

The cop has always been a little curious, not that he’d admit it, about what the kid’s life is like outside of work. Always kind of assumed Bright spent every free second elbow deep in case files and morbid studies. 

He’s starting to think he was dead right on that one.

“And those are just the ones that had organs removed,” Malcolm is slurring his words a little, the half-empty bottle in one hand and a half-dozen brown folders in the other as he gesticulates through his monologue, “this doesn’t even account for the two dozen or so bodies that were never recovered.”

“Two dozen or so,” JT jabs, and maybe he’s slurring a little too as he extends a hand over his shoulder for his turn with the bottle, “don’t got an exact number on that one?”

Conceding the point, Malcolm almost misses the outstretched hand as he makes two attempts to pass the whiskey. He’s as drunk as JT has ever seen him, which isn’t saying much. 

“Best estimate… Maybe like, twenty-one. Or twenty. A lot of variables.”

JT shifts, his back aching even through the pleasant buzz of whiskey as it burns down his throat. 

Even half-tossed, Bright notices the subliminal movement in a heartbeat. Whatever corners of his brain make him a good profiler don’t turn off, inebriated or otherwise. Always grinding the gears.

“You can sit up here,” he quickly offers, shuffling away the boxes and papers he has spread out around him like a ring of organized chaos. “I can move some stuff—”

“I’m the one who sat on the floor, relax,” the cop quickly waves him off, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Bad back, floor’s better. Threw it out twice on tour.”

Malcolm is quiet for a moment, but the rustle of movement stops. JT shoots an appraising look at him over his shoulder. 

“It’s alright, you can ask.”

A peace offering. Most people can’t ask. The cop is just as surprised at himself for offering.

Bright is quiet for a long beat, and JT’s still not a profiler but he knows his own words are ringing in the kid’s ears. Biting his head off for a similar line of conversation in the dark. Selfishly, he hopes this makes up for it. Makes it clear that he’s offering an olive branch and an apology and a  _ bury the hatchet _ all in one. 

Cracking open his chest for the first time in years and offering a glimpse of himself that’s more than the cold, polite distance he keeps between himself and the rest of the world.

He takes a chance that he’s been too hot and cold, too confusing. That Malcolm is still trying to play it safe and respect the boundaries JT reflexively drew in the sand between them. 

He forges on, tasting whiskey.

“Joined up at eighteen. Armored cav first, then went infantry. Like a dumbass. S’what the tough guys do, right?”

He can hear the buzz of energy around Malcolm, wonders if he’s learning him well enough to feel it or if it’s just always there. He thinks too loud.

“Is that how you got your injury?”

He’s not talking about a slipped disc and they both know it. The cop hasn’t told anyone about that. Not even Dani. It’s in his personnel file, so Gil knows, but he’s not surprised in the slightest that Malcolm picked it up, maybe even the first day they met.

He resists the urge to take another drink, his fingers twitching around the bottle. 

“Happened in Afghanistan, 2008. Truck flipped. I got pinned. Couple hours there before they could extract us,” he goes silent for a long moment, staring across the room at the weapon display hanging on either side of the projector screen. He swallows. “Lost my dog.” 

He’s glad that for once, Malcolm doesn’t try to say anything. Doesn’t offer awkward hollow condolences or empty platitudes. God knows he had to put up with enough of that when he made it back to US soil, shake enough hands and conjure up enough polite smiles to last him the rest of his life. 

Masking the kind of pain men like him are told to bury deep and soldier past, because becoming stubborn, cold, impassive is vastly preferable to the alternative. To letting it slowly eat you alive. 

“Do you ever miss it?”

JT chances a look back, wondering if the kid is ever gonna stop surprising him. He breathes out a resigned sigh and turns away.

“All the time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty shocked with the positive feedback this fic had gotten, so thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who took the time to read and/or comment. 
> 
> I have infinite plans in store for these two, so stay tuned. I know I'm going to be taking some creative liberties with JT's story, but I really feel like there's a lot more there to explore, and a lot to understand about who he is and how he thinks. Especially if him coming around to feeling anything for Malcolm is going to be plausible. 
> 
> One thing for sure is there's gonna be a lot more angst/whump in their future. I can't make any promises on update schedules, but I do already have quite bit more written and am still grinding away. FYI, your feedback fuels me~ thank you again!


	3. Chapter Three

Bright’s phone goes off somewhere in the early hours of the morning. JT’s head is drooping back against the couch and he knows he fell asleep at some point. He blinks awake and tracks Malcolm’s voice somewhere in the kitchen, listens to that familiar note of poorly-contained excitement creep in. Highs and lows and dogged, unrelenting enthusiasm.

And he’s still an amatuer at speaking  _ Bright _ but he’d bet his paycheck they just caught another case. His first instinct is defeat, is  _ shit _ they haven’t even started breaking through their last one, and how much more can they handle at once? 

He digs out his own phone and struggles to read the text he knows is waiting for him from Gil. He’s bleary-eyed with exhaustion and definitely still half-drunk. The timing couldn’t be worse. 

Malcolm is off the phone, skids around the corner, pulling on socks with his shoes in hand. It’s clear from looking at him that he still hasn’t slept a wink.

“You good to drive?”

The cop lets his chin fall against his chest and works out the cramps in his shoulders from the awkward position. 

“Not even a little bit.”

“I’ll call a cab.”

**.**

It’s not quite 5AM when they arrive at a chemical distribution warehouse by the docks. A glowing green sign at the front reads  _ Reichman _ in block letters. 

A line of semis are backed into the loading bays and a floodlight is shining on an open garage door at the far end. Long yellow lines of crime scene tape stretch into the shadows, a silent warning that the day is starting early and there’s no end in sight. 

JT still can’t see straight so he spends the walk hoping he handed the cabbie a ten and not a twenty after swiping plastic for the ride. He hates taking cabs. 

Malcolm is back on full-auto, his eyes lit up, his steps long and bouncing like he’s ready to break into a run at any moment. A bloodhound on a fresh trail. A dog with a bone. Always chasing that high like it’s the only thing that keeps him running.

Hell, at this point it just might be.

The body is a mutilated mess, laying spread eagle on the warehouse floor. Throat cut. Blood has pooled out from the victim’s neck in a fan pattern, like a fallen angel with a single crimson wing. Vacant brown eyes staring up into nothingness, vague horror still plastered across slack features. 

Witnesses identify him as Alvarro Lugo, 38. Gil tells them he was the plant dayshift manager, in early for inventory. 

Bright pockets his phone and drops into a crouch, gloved hands ghosting over the scuff marks and blood trails without touching like he’s watching something play out that only he can see. 

JT watches silently, having learned not to be too skeptical of the process since they’ve had so much success with it. He’s half drunk and half asleep, and more than happy to play the part of observer for the moment until it’s time to get to work. And from the look of the place, the hoards of curious shift workers in dirty jeans gathering outside the tape, he’s sure there will be plenty of that to come. 

Bright stands abruptly, steepling gloved hands and staring down blankly for a long moment. He looks up at Gil. 

“Where’s the other body?”

Gil and Dani exchange slow looks.

JT rubs his aching temples and wishes for coffee. 

**.**

They find the second body in the trash compactor. Malcolm’s theory about the killer being interrupted turn out to be accurate, the manager an unfortunate casualty of his own ambitious schedule.

This corpse turns out to be the more telling of the two. Stripped naked and wrapped in plastic and tape. Teeth, eyes, and the first joint of each finger have all been removed. Bright starts working up a profile in minutes. 

Just from looking at him, you’d never know he’d been drinking, even if what JT guesses is several consecutive days without a wink of sleep is harder to hide. He’s all energy, riding the rush of a new puzzle to solve like a shot of adrenaline. 

JT spends the rest of morning distracted, moving through the scene on autopilot. He chugs bottled water between cups of coffee and manages to work his pounding headache down from full-blast to a dull roar between his ears. 

He’s getting too old for this shit, he thinks to himself morosely. He doesn’t have the stamina or starry-eyed motivation of his younger years, and comforts himself with the mental promise of a good ten hours or so of sleep the second he’s off the clock. 

He interviews the reporting party, the swing shift truck driver just trying to pick up his load and get back on the highway before breakfast. Moves on to the warehouse head, the employees on shift the night before. Dani splits the workload with him but it still seems to take ages. 

They take a break before noon, pitching in cash for one of the interns to make a sandwich run. They stand huddled together from the wind and eat in turns, silent, the food tasting like cardboard.

The cop briefly toys with the idea of grabbing one of the foil-wrapped subs and taking it to Malcolm, who is notably absent. At least giving the kid the option to eat. He squashes that plan quickly, reminding himself not for the first time that Bright’s not his responsibility. 

JT’s not his parent, not his guardian. If the kid’s too dumb to keep gas in the tank that’s a long way from being  _ his _ problem.

**.**

He loses his patience in the late hours of the afternoon, as he stands in the wind under a sky gloomy and white with clouds. 

The cop has spent the last hour watching the scene techs slowly pull in the perimeter, combing the exterior of the building with a fine tooth comb before pulling in the taped cordon a few feet at a time as they eliminate the outer edges of the scene for workable evidence. It’s an agonizingly slow process, and one they will doubtless be grinding at for the rest of the night. 

He’s too tired to stand there and wait for them to find something, too dead on his feet to stay awake without a task to occupy himself. He wanders back into the warehouse, his patience thin enough that staying calm with the officer keeping the scene log is a struggle. He rattles off his name and badge number for the fiftieth time that day, waits for the boot to scribble it down on his clipboard, and ducks under the tape. 

It’s dimly lit inside, long rows of metal shelving stretching away in both directions for what feels like miles. 

He’s come and gone enough times by now to navigate the maze, to find his way around the edges to the south side where the bay doors are situated. The same aisle where the first body was found. It’s already been carted and shipped off to the coroner, and all that remains to mark its presence is the caked blood and yellow markers. 

Techs and detectives alike have already made several sweeps of the scene. Somehow, JT still knew he’d find Malcolm here. 

Never quite satisfied. Never quite done hunting for clues that frankly, might not even exist. He’s the sole occupant of the warehouse for the moment, looking vaguely ethereal under the glow of diffused light from the south doors.

Bright is down on one knee, both hands against the pavement as he lowers his head to peer across the floor like there’s actually something there to see. He’s gotta hear JT as he approaches, but if he does he makes no indication of it. 

Someone—probably Gil—brought the kid a sandwich after all, and it’s sitting nearby on a rolling plastic cart surrounded by scene markers and evidence bags. Unopened. JT glares at it, feeling irritated. 

“You gonna eat that?” It comes out sounding a lot more surly than he intended, and he blames that on being half hung-over and badly sleep deprived. 

“All yours,” Malcolm waves him off, clearly distracted. He pulls himself up into a crouch, elbows on his knees, still completely infatuated with whatever invisible map he’s following. 

The cop scowls.

“Not what I was gettin’ at, but okay.”

He watches silently, wondering what the hell Malcolm is even doing. The far-off stare, eyes unfocused and moving rapidly, the furtive movements of shoulders and hands, all still a bit unnerving to him. He’s not sure if it’s something he’ll ever get used to.

JT is already thinking about wandering off again, finding someone else to bother since Malcolm is being, if possible, even more boring than the CSI personnel. He’s interrupted by Malcolm’s heavy sigh, the kid’s head tipping heavily towards the floor.

“I’m missing something,” Bright sounds frustrated, worn out.

Even though Bright won’t be able to see it, JT raises a skeptical eyebrow. Chooses to keep his mouth shut, because in his current mood he’s not sure if he can completely curb his sarcasm. He wants to point out that the scene is ten hours old and there are still a  _ lot _ of missing pieces, all things considered. Somehow doubts that would be helpful. 

“What am I missing?”

The cop is so convinced the kid is still talking to himself that it takes him a beat to turn and see those bright eyes fixed on him, like JT of all people has the answers.

“Lunch,” he retorts flatly, “and a nap.”

Bright dismisses the pointed comment like he didn’t even hear it. He shoots to his feet, his hands twisting in front of his body like the physical stimulation is going to be enough to get neurons and synapses firing in sync, his brain working harder and faster to piece together an incomplete snapshot. 

The cop watches him incredulously, wondering how he gets anything done all wound up like a coiled spring all the time. He feels the need to interrupt him before he has to watch his head explode, but finds himself at a loss for what exactly to say. 

Drinking themselves senseless in Bright’s big apartment feels like a lifetime ago. Like they were both different people, relaxed and loose-lipped and letting the unbearable stress of the job fall from their shoulders for a few short hours. 

The moment of introspection passes quickly, and JT is jarred back to the present by that little warning bell in his head that goes off when something isn’t quite right. 

Bright is too still, like he’s frozen in place. Eyes blank and glazed. The kid wavers on his feet, goes pale. He sways alarmingly and it only takes a heartbeat for JT to recognize what’s about to happen. 

“Woah, woah,” JT reaches out instinctively, stepping forward and catching Bright by the shoulders as he tips forward, knees buckling. 

Thankfully the kid doesn’t go all the way out, stumbling as the cop puts a big hand flat against his chest and keeps him upright. JT can feel his heartbeat jackhammering away, count every rib. He’s alarmingly light. Small, like he’s about to break apart in his hands. 

The cop backs the kid up and sits him down on a stack of boxes. They’re pushed up against the end of a long row of tall industrial shelving, stacked from floor to ceiling with shrink-wrapped pallets. For now it’s a blessedly shadowed corner, quiet and away from prying eyes. 

“Hey, hey, hey, talk to me,” JT is spouting mindless nonsense, wrapping one big hand around the back of the kid’s neck and keeping him tipped forward just enough, hopefully, to regain his equilibrium. “Just breathe, okay? Ride it out kid, you’re good.”

“I’m fine, sorry — I’m fine,” is what Malcolm starts repeating weakly as he clears his head.

It’s a claim so outlandish at this point that JT has to bite back a hysterical laugh. It’s not funny, not even remotely. It’s got his stomach all tied up in knots and his heart slamming away at his ribs like it wants to bust out. 

“You just about ate the pavement,” JT tries to steady his voice. “ _ Fine _ ain’t the word you’re lookin’ for.”

“Stood up too fast, chemicals—making me a little lightheaded,” and Malcolm is trying his damndest to laugh it off, wave it all away through half-lidded eyes and skin gone so pale it’s nearly translucent. It’s clear he’s still reeling, still trying to claw his way back into awareness.

“Think I’m dumb enough to buy that…” the cop shakes his head, relief crashing over him as he watches the kid blink at the floor. The adrenaline dump is leaving him breathless and he lets himself slump a bit, his knee smarting on the concrete where he dropped a little too fast. 

He sits with him there in the dark for the longest time, seconds blurring into each other in an endless loop. They’re both trying to pull it together, their breath loud in the silence. 

JT realizes he’s still got a death grip on the back of Malcolm’s neck, is still holding onto him like he’s the one who needs the support here. Bright’s long fingers are twisted in the sleeve of the cop’s jacket, his white-knuckled grip enough to keep JT from letting go. 

“I’m fine,” the kid says again after too long, and his voice sounds a little stronger, the words a little more sure. 

“You trying to convince me, or  _ you _ ?”

The cop lets his hand fall away with a strange reluctance, and Bright seems to fall in on himself at the loss of contact. It makes him wonder if it was the right move, if his focus should really be on trying to make this less awkward for them both. 

He isn’t sure what else to say. Isn’t sure how he can go on ignoring the warning signs when Malcolm doesn’t even have the energy to keep his feet anymore. The kid looks drained, hollow and brittle like he could shatter to pieces at any moment. 

“What’d’ya need,” the cop asks quietly when nothing else seems right, when reverting to solving problems and finding solutions becomes the safest retreat in unfamiliar territory. 

Malcolm blinks at the floor, his hand slowly releasing the worn leather sleeve he’s been clutching like it’s the only thing keeping him anchored. 

“Air.”

JT breathes out through his nose, nodding. 

“Go take a breather, alright?” He tips his head over his shoulder, towards the big bay doors letting in a misty half-light through flaps of plastic. “I’ll grab some caffeine.”

He lets Malcolm stand at his own pace, relieved when he seems fairly steady on his feet, but he stubbornly keeps one big hand under the kid’s elbow for support until he’s certain he doesn’t need it anymore. 

Lets him have his pride when the kid pulls away and walks unsteadily across the aisle, disappearing into the fresh air. 

JT is floundering. 

He thinks about running to Gil, trying to pass this problem off to someone he’s certain is far better equipped to handle it than he is. To spill the beans on someone whose own bullheaded behavior is gonna get him hurt eventually if something doesn’t give. 

It’s the concept of betrayal that stops him. Of taking yet another step back the wrong way in this endless back and forth between them. He’s immediately guilty for even thinking it.

Gil will send Malcolm home. If he knows anything, he knows that. No way in hell is Gil gonna let the kid endanger himself anymore than he already has, let him stick around a delicate, still-evolving scene when he’s running on fumes and delirious with exhaustion. Literally a zombie on his feet.

He’s torn. Maybe it’s for the best if someone  _ does _ end Bright home, forces him to get some rest, puts their foot down. Maybe that’s exactly what the kid needs and JT is just too dense to see it. 

Even if it kills Bright to step off a scene while there’s still so much work to be done, there has to be a breaking point.

He’s no closer to figuring out what to do when he stops by the relief van in the massive sally port where the mobile command post and CSI vans have made camp. He fills up two cups with coffee from the tall brown decanter hanging off the tailgate. Wanders back up towards the receiving bay, follows the kid’s tracks out through the heavy hanging plastic strips to the chill outside. 

Bright is standing on the edge of the receiving docks, his shoes toeing the edge of the drop. It’s only about six feet down to the pavement, stained with grease and grime from thousands of trucks backing into the bay, but it still makes JT nervous to see. 

The kid paints an isolated figure standing there in the wind, his coat blowing around his thin shoulders, hair whipping. He looks alone. Lost, like he did standing in his apartment.

JT walks over to stand shoulder to shoulder with the profiler, quiet for a long moment. Reaches a hand out to offer him the cup of coffee. 

Malcolm takes it quickly, nodding his gratitude. His hand is shaking violently. 

The cop reminds himself to proceed with caution. Everything in him wants to grab the kid by the elbow and pull him back a step or two, away from the edge. Just a few minutes ago Malcolm all but lost consciousness from standing up too quick, for chrissakes. 

He manages to resist, comforting himself with the knowledge that if Malcolm blacks out again at least he’s close enough to grab him. 

JT frowns into the bleak silence, one hand stuffed into his pocket for warmth, the fingers of his right slowly drumming on cardboard. There’s a proverbial elephant in the room and he’s not sure why he’s so hesitant to call it what it is. 

“Why aren’t you sleeping, Bright?”

He can feel the tension rolling off Malcolm from beside him, sees him shift from one foot to the other out of the corner of his eye. It takes a lot of willpower to stay casual. He palms his paper cup and take a sip.

The coffee’s burnt and bitter and he barely notices. 

“Hard to explain,” the kid grinds out eventually, and it’s a way out. An offering to stay distant and professional and impersonal, and JT’s sure that’s exactly what he thinks the cop wants. Malcolm’s still trying not to trip over invisible boundaries, and maybe a few weeks ago he would have been right.

He thinks about speaking Bright’s language. About reading things that aren’t said out loud.

“Try me.”

He can hear the nervous breath stutter out from beneath clenched teeth. Even over the wind.

“My father’s been calling me. A lot.”

JT doesn’t like the note of shame he can hear in the kid’s voice. He pauses for a beat, turns his body towards the profiler, unconsciously shielding their conversation in the biting wind despite their isolation. 

“Thought he was in solitary.”

The cop doesn’t know enough about the situation, just bits and pieces he’s caught in passing. Tense conversations in briefing rooms between Malcolm and Gil, casual comments. He knows enough to understand that most of what the kid is going through is a direct product of the hell his own father put him through in his childhood, and that over the past few months he’s been invading his life again. 

All their lives, he thinks, recalling the crisis at the mental hospital not long ago. 

“Yeah, well,” Bright’s shoulders droop as his chin tips towards the pavement, “not anymore.”

“What does he want?” JT pushes on into unfamiliar territory, feeling bold in the wake of their newfound trust... if it can be called that. 

“What he always wants,” Bright sounds frustrated, defeated, terrified. “I spent so many years letting him manipulate me, building this pseudo-relationship, like that’s something he even knows how to have… He wants to control me, use me, make me think I’m  _ crazy _ like he is—”

He cuts himself off, breathless. There’s an almost manic look in his eyes that JT thinks he might finally be starting to understand. The wind picks up and rips at the kid’s too-long hair, whipping it into his face and those eyes are gone again. 

“He’s trying to get into my head.”

A thrill of fear runs up JT’s spine, cold and ugly. It’s less from what Malcolm says than  _ how _ he says it. Like he’s walking into the jaws of a lion and there’s no hope left, like everything is absolute. Written in stone.

The drop off the docks beside him feels like a lot further down with those words hanging between them. It feels infinite. 

JT stares at the pavement below, and he’s completely at a loss. What is he supposed to say to that?

“You’re not gonna let him,” he manages to get out when he’s found his voice again. He takes a half step closer, dipping his head and silently willing Malcolm to meet his eyes. He waits for it, the silence heavy between them. “You’re  _ not. _ ”

Bright’s smile is sad, like he’s already been defeated. “No,” he heaves out a sigh, raises his chin just a fraction. It’s clear as day that he’s struggling to believe it himself.

The cop isn’t sure he’s ever felt so out of place. He’s floundering, in over his head by a mile and too stubborn to back down. The headache that’s been knocking at his skull all day is suddenly back, full force. 

The cop needs to fix this, because that’s what he does. He  _ fixes _ things, finds solutions. He’s a man of action. 

He doesn’t have a solution for this. 

It’s an act of will not to fall back on old defaults, not to push the kid like he would a civilian, or even another cop. Not to make sweeping generalizations like  _ everything is gonna be okay,  _ not to ask him to tell another polite lie. If last night proved anything, it was that they were finally starting to understand each other, if only a little bit at a time. 

For reasons he can’t understand, his brain flips like a switch back to sitting on crates in the dark, the feeling of his hand wrapped around the back of Bright’s neck. The way the kid sighed into the touch like it was the most relieving thing in his atmosphere. 

How cold and hollow he felt when he forced himself to pull away. 

“Thanks for the coffee,” Malcolm’s voice is stronger as he says it, like he’s pulling on a mask of wholeness and finding comfort in the familiarity of it. His eyes are distant and hollow. JT can see the light flickering. 

Bright takes a step back and turns, disappearing back into the warehouse. Back to work, back to chaos and control and the little puzzles he puts together in his brain to distract himself from all of it.

JT watches him go in silence, feeling sick to his stomach. 

He needs to take a moment to center himself, to fight back the wave of nausea roiling in his gut, to calm his raging heartbeat. He knows he’s only scratched the surface of understanding the kind of twisted hold Martin Whitly has on his son, knows there are depths to that ocean he can’t begin to comprehend. The little ripples and waves of agony that have spread out from the twisted doctor’s actions decades ago. 

He doesn’t understand what he’s feeling. The sheer anger surprises him, the sense of injustice that on top of all the shit going on in Malcolm’s brain, his murderous sociopath of a father feels the need to barge in and add so much on top of that. To see the toll it’s taking, both physical and emotional, is painful. 

More than anything, he’s floored by the surge of raw protectiveness that wells up inside him out of nowhere, like he has any right to feel that way. About  _ Bright _ , of all people. 

Bright and all his shattered pieces, more likely to cut himself than anyone else on the edges. Bright and his damn blue raspberry eyes.

It’s a tangle of strings and however he pulls at the mess, the knot just tightens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *angst intensifies*
> 
> In case it’s not obvious… this is shaping up to be long. I feel like not a lot is actually happening yet, but I do promise to remedy that shortly. Hang in there.
> 
> As an aside, JT is evolving into essentially a chunkier, male version of me. A version that doesn’t have wishful thinking and gratuitously self-indulgent fiction to cope with his issues. On the flipside, I am also a chunkier, female version of Malcolm. No idea how but seriously feel like these two are like the two halves of my personality, and (obviously) I’m sort of using that to take creative liberties with the hopes that I can still keep them both in character as much as possible. It’s tough not having much JT material to work with.
> 
> Also for those who care, of whom I am sure there are maybe, two… @theyhulk and I have come up with our ultimate ship name. #Brimel. Make that shit happen.


	4. Chapter Four

In the beginning, back when Gil first brought Malcolm on board, let him start tagging along on some of their highest profile cases to _ consult _, of all things, JT was livid. 

He remembers having a knock-down drag-out argument in his boss’ office, behind tilted blinds and glass too thin to hide their raised voices. Spouting off a dozen reasons why bringing the kid on board wouldn’t work. Why it could never work. Insisting that Malcolm was a liability and not an asset and at the time, fully believing it to be true.

Looking back, he feels like he understands himself a little better. Recognizes that his wrath had been misplaced and misdirected and frankly, a little juvenile. 

He’d been defensive, protective. Hurt. Running on emotion weakly disguised as logic. 

The real heart of the matter was simply that he had fought long and hard to allow himself to have faith in Gil and Dani, to chip away at his own defenses to the point where he finally trusted them. The real kind of trust, like he’d once had with his platoon in distant desert warzones. 

The kind of trust accompanied by an absolute certainty that they would have his back, would come through when he needed them to. Show up and keep showing up.

Having an unwelcome stranger thrown into that mix felt like betrayal. 

The circle of hard-won trust and close-knit camaraderie had been broken, and the parts of himself that craved real trust and stability and _ family _ crumbled as he understood that it was all temporary. Meaningless. 

He’d felt displaced. Dismissed. Less of an important part of a team and more of a footnote. 

In hindsight, he’d overreacted. Anger was his knee-jerk reaction to anything that tasted too much like _ hurt _ and he’d been that way for as long as he could remember. Without taking the time to process, he’d lashed out for reasons Gil could never possibly understand and masked them all under pretense. 

Always drawing hard lines between the things he understood and the things he didn’t, too stubborn to dig any deeper. 

All he knew for sure at the time was that Bright seemed like a physical manifestation of everything he hated most in the world. Unpredictable. Irresponsible, unreliable, volatile. Spontaneous, ready to combust at any moment. Putting them all at risk as he slowly but surely orchestrated his own destruction. 

It had taken JT time to understand that when that violent, pulsating star at the center of Bright’s universe finally imploded, the only person it was going to destroy was _ him _. 

**.**

“We’re looking for two killers,” Malcolm says instead of _ good morning _ as JT files into the briefing room behind Dani and Gil. 

“Can I drink my coffee first,” Dani isn’t really asking for permission as she sets her mug down and starts adding creamer. A morning ritual she’s not about to interrupt for god himself. 

“Number one. He’s older, mid 30’s to 40’s. White male, because, of course he is,” Malcolm doesn’t seem to hear her, whipping around to the bulletin board and the collage of photos and schematics he’s arranged in a way that only makes sense to him. 

The kid’s a mess, to put it lightly. Wrinkled sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, his shirt unbuttoned and tie hanging by a loop. Case files and lab reports are scattered across the table. A laptop is glowing, balanced precariously on the nearest rolling chair, just waiting for a single careless movement to tip off entirely. 

Malcolm’s pale as a ghost, and if he bothered to close his eyes for half-a-second he’d look like a walking corpse himself. Instead, the familiar fires of obsession are raging behind his pupils, shining out like a lighthouse through a storm. 

“He’s an organized killer, meticulous, a planner. He’ll likely be in a position of power: a supervisor, or a manager or business owner. His image is important to him, and by all appearances he’s a model citizen.”

JT raises his eyebrows across the table at Gil, who gives him a long-suffering shrug and crosses his arms, willing to wait it out. 

“Second killer—” Malcolm slides across to the whiteboard, marker in hand, circling a massive column of words written in scribbled ink, the script too small for them to read. “Disorganized. Impulsive, likely younger by a wide margin. He’s unable to resist his own compulsions and will display ritualized behavior, such as systematic mutilation, collecting souveniers. Killer One has latched onto him, seeing an opportunity to manipulate a weaker personality.”

Malcolm finally turns around, presumably to witness the effect of his words on the team. He pauses, confused, when he isn’t met with the expected gusto.

“Have you been here all night?” Gil asks evenly. 

“What—are you listening to me?” Malcolm gestures impatiently, tapping his marker against the board. “This is the missing piece, the break we’ve been waiting on! The profile was fragmented because it’s _ two _ profiles.”

Sensing the tension in the room, Dani purses her lips and quietly stirs her drink.

Gil is still leveling a stern glare at Bright, and JT is immeasurably glad he isn’t the one on the receiving end of that disapproving look. He makes a point to turn his attention somewhere else.

“Guys, give us the room,” Gil finally sighs.

Dani and JT are quick to obey, out of their seats before Bright can finish protesting. Dani pulls the door shut behind them and follows JT the short distance to the coffee machine. 

The cop draws in a long, deliberate breath, huffs it out slowly. He pulls his oversized travel mug out of the cupboard overhead, his initials written on the bottom in sharpie, and blankly watches it fill with bubbling dark liquid. 

Dani props her hip against the counter and sighs into her coffee. They stand there for a few minutes in silence, trying to ignore the murmur of animated voices drifting from the briefing room. 

“You get any sleep,” she finally asks him. 

JT is betting it’s more of a pointed attempt to talk over the sounds of an argument than it is to make any real conversation.

He grunts out a non-committal noise and dumps sugar into his cup, his head still fuzzy and stalling out like an engine that doesn’t want to turn over.

“More than Bright, I’m guessing,” he grumbles eventually, wishing the drink was cool enough to chug. 

“You two seem to be getting along better.”

He raises an incredulous eyebrow. 

She dips her head in a wishy-washy, back and forth motion, shoulders raising. “I said _ better _ , okay. Like, it’s not quite _ as _ terrible to be in the same room with you both.” 

Dani’s probably right, but he won’t give her the satisfaction of agreeing out loud. 

“I’m too damn tired this week to start shit,” he says instead. 

She sighs, a silent agreement. 

Neither of them have the heart to point out that it’s not quite 8 AM on a Saturday, and their caseload has steadily built up around them like the walls of a prison. They haven’t had a day off in several weeks; Gil probably a lot longer than that. The unpredictable nature of being on call 24 hours a day has taken its toll on all of them, and the stress is starting to show. Deep lines etched into their foreheads, eyes red with lack of sleep, underlined by shadows. 

“How many vacation days you got saved up,” Dani asks wistfully, like she’s reading his mind.

JT slumps against the counter beside her, staring blankly across the bullpen at nothing. He’s tired down to his bones. 

“All of ‘em.”

**.**

  
  


He’s not sure what exactly Malcolm pulled out of his sleeve to avoid getting taken off the case entirely, but it was clearly enough to do the trick. 

Or maybe Gil’s just a realist, as hyper-aware of their own looming workload as JT is. With two unsolved headliners on the table and command staff breathing down their necks for results, it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation if they’ve ever had one. 

After the morning dramatics are past, Gil sits the team down in the briefing room and has them start matching Reichman employees against Bright’s profiles. He interrupts them for an early lunch. 

The Lieutenant won’t allow them to eat over the case this time, and despite their initial protests JT thinks it’s a sliver of insight into what makes him a good leader. Strong-arming them into taking a step back, even for an hour or so, does more for their overtaxed brains and tired eyes than he could have imagined. They slump into a booth in the crowded bistro across the street, blinking at each other like strangers. 

JT picks up on the exchanged looks between Gil and Malcolm, gets the feeling that accompanying them to lunch might have been part of the bargain that kept Bright on the job in the first place. 

The kid doesn’t look thrilled about being pulled away from his work, but he orders a bowl of soup with minimal protests. It’s clear he knows he’s on thin ice. They eat in silence, Gil trapping Malcolm in the booth next to him until he’s cleaned out his bowl.

An hour later back at the precinct, JT walks past the bathrooms and pretends not to hear the kid heaving his guts up behind closed doors. 

It’s not his problem, he tells himself. Not his battle to fight, not today.

They dive back into laptops and case files and endless stacks of records. 

In the end, it’s Edrisa who comes through with the critical link. The second victim, the one in the trash compactor, was mutilated beyond recognition and no DNA matches were found in their system. Even so, she’s able to isolate trace DNA not belonging to the victim and find several partial hits. 

One of those hits is David Michael Grezny, a maintenance worker formerly employed by Reichman Chemicals. After a handful of urgent phone calls they learn that he was fired after a physical altercation with another employee, though no charges were pressed. 

They have a warrant for Grezny’s apartment by five. 

It’s a flurry of loud announcements, the crack of splintered wood, the buzz of earpieces as ESU coordinates the entry. 

JT completes an initial sweep with the Tac 1 team; another stack moves in behind them for a secondary search with fresh eyes. Gil’s team follows on their heels, sweeping from room to room as they finish scouring the residence. 

One by one, calls of _ Clear _ echo through the apartment and it becomes obvious that their intended target is nowhere in sight. They call 10-77 across the radio and the team collectively slings rifles. It’s a familiar mixture of disappointment and relief, of knowing their job isn’t done but they’ll be allowed a moment of peace while they plan their next move.

Malcolm is the first to spot the pinhole camera system above the door, a half-dozen more situated at strategic vantage points around the apartment. They collectively deflate as they realize that if they ever had the element of surprise in the first place, they’ve lost it. 

Holding his handgun close to his body, muzzle pointed down in _ Sul _, JT drifts to the kitchen table as chaos flurries around him. His brows furrow as he stares down at the mess of paper and notebooks scattered across the surface, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. 

Endless circular loops are drawn in pen, some with intricate precision, others scrawled and rushed. There must be hundreds of variations of the symbol. Crumpled sheets of paper litter the floor, skittering across the tile in front of his boots. He crouches to pick one up, smoothing it out. 

This time he’s able to recognize it. It’s a crude snake, the head consuming its own tail. 

JT stares at it for a long moment. It’s vaguely familiar, like he may have seen it somewhere at some point, but it’s nothing he can place. He lets it fall back to the floor. All things considered, it feels like the least important part of their search. Even so, he can’t shake the image from his head as he slowly circles the kitchen, then the cramped living room.

It’s Dani who hones in on the bedroom closet standing ajar, brings them running with dread in her voice. 

There’s a hastily-constructed workbench taking up the small space, built of steel plumber’s tape and two by fours. A single fluorescent bulb hands from a chain, swinging wildly over spools of wire, dissected phones, circuit boards and jugs of chemicals. 

“He’s building bombs,” Malcolm sounds awed, almost impressed. “Big ones.”

Gil grabs him by the shoulder and drags him out of the bedroom, waving the entry team back. 

“We have to evacuate the building, bring in bomb squad,” Arroyo is all business, “kill radio communication until we’re out of range.”

For once, Bright is smart enough not to argue with him.

Where any sane human might have had the good sense to feel trepidation, dread, even fear in the face of their current situation, it seems to have the opposite effect on the profiler. The thrill of the chase, the mounting excitement of a rapidly-evolving scenario is written all over his face. He’s fixated, riding the wave like a junkie getting a fix.

Adrenaline is a nasty high with a steep drop, JT thinks as he shakes his head and keeps his mouth shut. With or without his help, the kid is gonna crash sooner or later. He joins ESU in going door-to-door throughout the complex, arguing disgruntled residents out of their homes. 

Gil is watching Malcolm like a hawk, daring him to try anything stupid. He drags the kid downstairs with him, all the way out to the patrol cars parked at the end of the block as he makes his phone calls. 

When JT rejoins them, Bright is pacing just behind the newly-established perimeter, his hair falling into his eyes every time he turns on his heel. Every time he raises restless hands to comb it back. An endless, pointless cycle of wasted movement. 

“What’s wrong with you,” the cop can’t resist snapping, feeling exasperated. He immediately regrets it, knowing that most of what the kid spits out isn’t going to make much sense to him anyway. 

Malcolm’s eyes are chasing ghosts, darting from building to building, face to face as he scans the growing crowd behind the barriers. 

“We’re _ missing _ something,” he bites it out like acid.

“If you don’t stop telling me we’re missing shit, I’ll have you missing teeth,” the cop shoots back, shaking his head. 

There’s no real aggression there, not like there used to be, but he’s testy out of habit. He hasn’t smoked in almost ten years, but finds his fingers twitching for a cigarette like he only stopped yesterday. Maybe he does need a vacation.

“What are the bombs for,” Bright is still muttering, almost to himself. “The use of explosives imply extremism, radical ideology. A sense of social disconnection and the need to lash out—”

“Yeah, bombers you know. They’re fuckin’ nutcases,” JT can’t resist chipping in sarcastically, knowing he’s doing absolutely nothing but stirring the pot. 

He’s looking around for Dani, hoping she gets back quickly so he can pawn Bright and his feverish, rambling theories off on her. Gil is standing by the driver’s side door of the car still on his cell, deep in animated conversation, so there’s no help there. 

“Reichman,” Bright is still going, still wound up and spinning his wheels, “he was fired, that’s his target. We need to get them evacuated, make sure we do a sweep for improvised devices.”  
  


“Yeah, Gil’s working on that already. Just tell me, how do we go from an organized killer mutilating John Does, to a radical nutjob planting IED’s,” JT feels his composure eroding, a headache wrapping around his skull. “None of this is making sense, kid.” 

“I don’t know,” Malcolm is frustrated; it’s bubbling out of him like lava. “I—I told you I’m missing pieces—something in the profile—”

“What you’re missing is a few loose screws,” the cop grumbles, his patience quickly circling the drain. “You ever stop to think you might be able to put together a useful profile for us if you pulled your head out of your ass?”

Malcolm looks a little surprised at the outburst, which keeps JT from regretting his harsh tone. At least it threw a wrench in the works; disturbed Bright’s OODA loop long enough for the cop to get a word in edgewise. 

The kid is buzzing like a wind-up toy, destined to shake itself to pieces if not interrupted by an outside force. JT is, on this particular occasion, more than willing to offer his services in that department. 

He turns to face Bright, casting a quick eye around for unwelcome ears. Gil is still barking orders through a phone, ESU loading up their rams and shields in oversized gray vans. Blue-uniformed boots are taking up posts at the barriers, warning back the growing crowd of curious onlookers. For now, they’re marginally sheltered from any potential audience. 

JT pushes the point, and his luck. 

“You’re not eating, or sleeping, or running on fuck-all besides caffeine and some kind of neuotic obsession—” the cop forces himself to take a breath through his nose, to rein in his mounting friustration, “look, the point is, you’re a liability right now. You need to get your shit together, or we _ all _ suffer.”

He might as well have slapped the kid. From the look on Malcolm’s face, it’s the first time he’s considered things from this point of view, and JT takes a twisted sort of satisfaction in that. He watches guilt flicker across blue eyes. Regrets being the one to cause it, but prays it’s enough to finally hammer some sense into his skull. 

“I’ll sleep when we catch him,” Bright finally says hollowly, and it sounds like an argument but his tone is defeated. There’s no fire there.

JT resists the urge to physically throw his hands up in exasperation.

“Yeah? And when we catch him, what about the next one, huh? There’s _ always _gonna be another one. Another case, another killer. You can’t keep this up.” 

He knows it’s a low blow when he adds, “_ we _ can’t keep this up.” He gestures between himself and Gil, the implication clear. 

He thinks if it gets the profiler to take a breather, it might be worth it. Take them all off babysitting duty for a few days, dispel that lingering weight on his shoulders always pushing him to make sure the kid is still alive, still keeping his shit together. 

A task he has to remind himself entirely too often isn’t remotely his responsibility. 

“I won’t be a liability,” Bright says finally without making eye contact, and that feverish glint is back. Like he’s covering up the hurt with sheer stubbornness; like that’s somehow enough to keep him running on fumes. 

“I’ll pull it together. I’ll get a better profile.”

It’s not what the cop was going for and he heaves a long sigh, scrubbing a hand across his face. Neither of them are in the right frame of mind to be having this conversation and he knows it. Recognizes that there’s still a critical communication barrier looming between them, and that despite all their progress there are still too many times when he can’t figure out for the life of him how to get around it. 

He doesn’t know how to make the kid see that he _ cares _ and isn’t just being a dick. That he’s really trying to say _ I’m fucking worried about you _ but it’s coming out as _ don’t get us killed. _

“Look,” he starts to say, scrambling to pull the edges together and make Bright see sense, even if he doesn’t always know how to get the words out right. “There’s no shame in taking a few hours to rest up, we’ve hit a dead end here—”

He’s cuts himself off as he watches Malcolm go stock still out of nowhere, his eyes fixed on the street past the cop’s shoulder. For a heart-dropping moment, JT wonders if he’s worked himself up enough to pass out again.

Before he has time to blink, Malcolm is flat-out running, almost shoulder-checking JT in his mad dash to god knows where. 

“Bright, what the hell!” JT yells after him, realizes a beat too late that the kid is chasing _ someone. _ A bystander in the gathering crowd of civilians, sprinting down the sidewalk away from the building. 

_ Grezny_, he has time to think in shock. _ The bastard came back. _

_ Malcolm is fast for a little shit, _ is what he thinks next, a second before he curses roundly, and starts running too.

“Get the car!” He shouts over his shoulder at Gil, praying he has the sense to follow them.

.

If JT had stopped to think about, he should have realized something was wrong from the start. 

Besides the fact that he’s chasing Malcolm and Malcolm is chasing Grezny—or so he assumes—they aren’t headed into the heart of town, where the fleeing suspect could have easily lost himself in the crowds and shops. 

Instead they run south, down narrow alleys and car-crowded streets. There are warehouses here, old businesses long-since boarded up as industry migrated and crowded into uptown. Empty lots, half-demolished buildings with rusted “For Sale” signs gathering dust on chain link fences. 

Grezny and Malcolm easily outpace him; he’ll be the first to admit he’s not a runner. 

_ You catch ‘em, I’ll clean ‘em, _he’d bantered frequently with his old partner on patrol, only half joking. His wide shoulders and hefty frame weren’t built for distance. He’s reminded of that now, an angry stitch in his side stabbing like a knife under his ribs. 

“319 we’re running south, still in pursuit,” he yells into his radio, praying it’s coming through clear. Multitasking during a foot pursuit is one of his least favorite activities. Between the crackle of rushing air and his own winded voice, it’ll be a miracle if any responding units will be able to make out what he’s saying at all. 

He puffs out air, tries to get his rhythm back, forces himself to keep going. Sirens sound off in the near distance, the sweet sound of backup on wheels closing in. All he needs to do is keep the kid in his eyeline until they arrive. That’s a task easier said than done.

Groaning to himself, JT pushes his screaming muscles to pick up the pace as almost a full block ahead, Malcolm’s coat whips out of sight around a corner. 

By the time he reaches the curb, Bright’s halfway across an empty gravel lot, following Grezny’s thin shadow as the suspect vanishes around what appears to be an abandoned parking garage. The vehicle entrances are barricaded and boarded over, paint peeling and weeds growing from every crevice. From the look of the place, it’s probably stood condemned for half a decade or more. 

The sirens are closer now, maybe a block away. Then again, so is Malcolm. Where the kid is finding the energy to run is anyone’s guess. Perhaps more urgently, so is his plan if he actually manages to catch up to his target. 

That thought alone gives JT another surge of energy. 

He rounds the edge of the building, gun raised, huffing for breath. There’s a pillared inset halfway down the long wall, and from the look of it possibly a door on the other side. Grezny disappears inside, and Malcolm is hot on his trail.

Gil pulls up beside him a second later, the crown vic’s abused tires smelling like burnt rubber and brake pads. Dani’s riding shotgun, out of the car with her service weapon drawn before the vehicle is even in park. Gil isn’t far behind. More sirens are closing in but they don’t have time to wait. 

Pausing in his tracks, JT’s eyes dart helplessly between them, the service door at the other end of the building, and the way Bright went. He doesn’t want to be in this situation, chasing the kid’s tail into danger and chaos, jumping without having any clue how he’s going to land. It screams against every instinct.

“Shit,” he swears to himself, his resolve wavering.

No matter what, he can’t leave the kid to get himself killed now. 

“Take the east door,” he bellows at them, waving his arm towards the other entrance, “cut him off!”

He takes off headed west, knowing there’s no way in hell he’s fast enough to catch up to Bright but hoping he gets a break somehow. He rounds the corner and sees the metal door ahead falling shut. He intercepts it before it latches, following the sound of running footsteps up the stairwell. 

“_Bright _!” He bellows at the top of his lungs, huffing as he takes the stairs two at a time. They’re ancient and crumbling, bits of rock and concrete dissolving under his boots.

He’s less concerned with catching Grezny and more _ terrified _ that if Bright catches up with him instead, it’s a fight he won’t come out on top of. Not alone. Gil’s claimed on more than one occasion that the kid can take care of himself; from the few short months they’ve spent working together, JT is inclined to heartily disagree. 

He almost runs into Malcolm on the third floor landing, pulling up short to avoid toppling them both.

“Where’d he go,” he spins the kid around roughly, adrenaline stripping him of tact.

“I don’t know,” Malcolm is wheezing too, but he seems a little better off than JT at least. 

The cop feels his heart sink, his pulse roaring like an ocean in his ears as he tries to huff out measured breaths.

“I don’t know if he kept going up, or went out on one of the floors,” Bright’s still rambling, still panting for air, twisting one hand into his hair in visible frustration.

“Shit,” JT bends to prop his hands on his knees, his gun hanging from his hand. Between the mad dash through the streets and the countless flights of stairs he just ran up, he’s about ready to have a heart attack. 

They both know the garage is too massive, too many shadowed corners and empty staircases. Grezny could have made it anywhere by now, and even if Gil and Dani managed to make it in on the other side, they simply don’t have the manpower to cover all the possible exits. 

“319, We lost him,” JT calls into his radio when he’s managed to get his breathing somewhat under control, “don’t know if he’s still in the garage or if he made it out. Be advised, subject should be considered armed and extremely dangerous, approach with caution.”

He doesn’t have time to wait for an answer, or even check that the transmission made it out through thick concrete walls. Bright grabs his arm, pulls him to the waist-high ledge looking down on the street below. 

There’s a thin figure standing across the empty street, three stories below them. JT’s heart skips a beat as he recognizes the same gray hoodie, stained black jeans. 

“Grezny,” JT breathes, “he doubled back.”

“He’s holding something—”  
  


The cop squints, trying to interpret the details of what he’s looking at. He reaches out a hand automatically to push Malcolm back from the edge, anticipating a weapon. 

He can almost make out a circular tattoo on the back of Grezny’s hand, the shape of it oddly familiar. The suspect turns his palm towards them, and he’s holding a cell phone. 

JT stares in confusion, trying to understand what’s happening. How they went from a mad dash through the city, to staring at each other across an abandoned street. 

“You think it’s possible he’s got us right where he wants us,” Bright asks almost casually, his voice altogether too calm for the situation.

It’s strange, the cop thinks distantly as he looks over at the profiler. 

Bright’s hands aren’t shaking anymore. 

It all happens in a split second. A roar of pure noise echoes up from somewhere beneath their feet, rumbling and building until it fills his skull. The steel and concrete surrounding them vibrates and trembles violently. 

Bright’s glowing pale eyes are the last thing JT sees as the walls crumble around them.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof. This was a tough one. I’m sorry if it feels like too much filler, but the plot hit me all at once and I had to set it up for the long haul. Rest assured the really heavy angst/whump is starting in the next chapter. And the more I write the more there is to go, so this is gonna be a wild ride. 
> 
> I’m also going to make my best attempt to post weekly on Tuesdays, if that helps.
> 
> Thank you again to all my beautiful readers, and especially those of you who literally make my day by dropping feedback or even just a little note. It’s the best feeling in the world to get a review, honestly. 
> 
> .
> 
> Definitions and Terminology:
> 
> ESU - NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit (think SWAT)
> 
> Sul - a safety position commonly used in firearms training. In this position the weapon is held close to the body, the muzzle pointed downwards to avoid “lasering” (covering) friendlies. 
> 
> OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide Act. - A concept that these four steps are the sequence of events involved in any person making any decision. Per training, in order to to effectively engage in a fight or confrontation your goal is to disrupt the OODA loop at one of these four stages. 
> 
> Boot - Slang for beat cop or patrol division, front-line units subject to dispatch on routine calls. 
> 
> 10-6 - Radio transmission code for “busy” or “standby”
> 
> 10-77 - Radio transmission code for “no contact”
> 
> .
> 
> Important! Read This!
> 
> I have created a #Brimel Discord server (link below) specifically dedicated to this pairing! It’s for writers, artists, fanbois, whatever. Come post thoughts and prompts for us writerly types, or get feedback or just geek out over the new episode with us. Everyone is welcome, and so far there’s just two of us (and tbh we’re super lonely ok) so come join!
> 
> https://discord.gg/K6tqRws 
> 
> .


	5. Chapter Five

JT wakes up to a knocking noise in his head and a mouth full of dust. He coughs, wheezes, blinks in the darkness. He’s disoriented, reeling. There’s a sliver of reflected half-light somewhere far above him and he can’t quite make sense of it at first. 

He tries to move and groans, his body protesting vehemently at the motion. Everything hurts, a dull ache that tells him whatever he hit, he hit it hard. 

His mouth and nose are clogged, acrid and bitter. He can’t move his legs. He’s pinned. 

Fighting back the panic building up in his throat, he forces himself to be still, to assess the situation. Dust in the air, darkness so deep it feels like he never even opened his eyes. There’s cold concrete at his back, beneath him. Something impossibly heavy across his legs. 

He’s having a hard time putting it together, remembering how he ended up here. Time and memory come back to him in disjointed pieces, little flashes of sights and sounds. Running footsteps and yelling through the wind into his radio. Divets and curves of a hard plastic grip in his palm, his service weapon. Malcolm’s too-calm eyes. White noise. 

He’s still breathing. Still with it, he tells himself. One problem at a time.

“Bright,” he yells into the darkness, “hey!”

Wherever he’s at, it’s not a large space. He can tell that much by the sound of his own voice, by the way it’s absorbed by stone and metal and falls back to him. 

His hands wander, trying to feel out the barrier he can feel beside him. It’s solid and immovable, a massive slab of the ceiling or wall. A few inches to the left and it could have killed him.

“_Malcolm _,” he bellows again, “answer me goddamit!”

He hears a movement somewhere to his right and feels the iron bands around his lungs relax their hold. 

“Kid, talk to me. You alive?”

“And kicking,” comes back a voice from the other side of the wall that makes him weak with relief. 

“Shit. You okay?”

The sound of rustling movement, labored breath comes back to him. The kid doesn’t answer right away and that nearly makes him panic all over again.

“Bright,” he tries to sound authoritative, confident. “I’m serious, you answer me. What’s the damage?”

“Kinda… feel like a building fell on me.” 

Against his will, a weak laugh bubbles out of JT’s chest. “Least you’re in good enough shape to still be a wise-ass.”

The cop lets his head thunk back against the cool concrete behind him, feels the stress bleeding slowly out of him at the simple knowledge that they’re somehow _ both _alive. 

“They should really hire you to work for the damn bomb squad, y’know. Since you seem to find every damn thing that explodes between here and Jersey…” 

He’s rewarded by a strained laugh, dry and quiet like it’s disguising a cough. Bright’s voice is closer now, but there’s still that wall between them. 

“Are you okay?”

“I asked you first.” JT kicks out, relieved to feel a little wiggle room somewhere around his boot. That’s about as much as he can move, but he can feel his legs and that’s promising. He’s got some freedom of movement, if it can be called that, with his left leg, but whatever he’s under is pressing uncomfortably over his right ankle. 

“Pinned, but I don’t think anything’s broke.”

“That’s good,” Malcolm sighs, and the words are slightly slurred.

The panic is back, clawing at the edges of his brain and demanding his attention. There’s nothing that could have prepared him for this, and the part of him that is a cop all the way down to his core is terrified of not having a plan. Not having those guidelines to show him the right way to handle this. 

The building came down around them, and by some miracle they’re both still alive. It’s enough to make a man start thinking about religion, if anything is. 

“You uh—you got your phone? Can you reach it?” 

He hears Malcolm moving, listens hopefully. 

“No service.”

“Okay well… keep trying it,” JT shifts experimentally, relieved that the pain of the impact is receding. 

He reaches down with his hands and feels along the rubble laying across his lower body. He feels concrete, exposed metal. Maybe a support beam, or a piece of the stairs. He pushes at it experimentally, constricted by the cramped space. He takes a steadying breath and heaves, plying all his strength against a half ton of concrete with no leverage. 

The rubble doesn’t budge, won’t give even a fraction of an inch. 

“Can’t fucking move,” he swears, trying not to let the frustration and terror he’s feeling bleed into his voice. “Anything on your side, a way out?”

Wherever the kid’s at he’s close enough that JT can hear him breathing, hear the telltale rasp of labored air. It’s too loud in the stillness, too inconclusive. For all he knows Malcolm could be spitting up dust and debris or he could be breathing around a punched lung. 

There’s no way for him to tell for sure and that knowledge is infuriating. 

He forces himself to be patient, listening to the slow scuffs and rustles of movement. It’s enough to tell him the kid’s alive, but not much else. He bites back his impatience, desperate not to lose his shit here while he doesn’t know the damage. 

“Afraid our luck ran out,” Malcolm sounds winded. 

JT can hear him sliding down the wall beside him, gravitating towards the only other sound of life in their temporary prison even if there’s still too much concrete and rubble between them for comfort.

The cop is good in a crisis, maybe an expert. He knows he can pull this one together, even if not having much to go on is infuriating. He just needs to stay calm, prioritize.

“Good news is, no way anybody missed that blast going off,” he talks himself through it out loud, needing to maintain some sort of lifeline for the other man, something that isn’t just harsh breath in the deafening silence. “Arroyo’s gonna have a squad on us in no time. They’re gonna get us out.” 

He doesn’t voice his concerns, his lingering fear that Gil and Dani may have also been somewhere in the building when it came down. It all happened so fast, it’s possible they never made it inside. Either way, it feels like too much to put on the kid now, when there’s nothing they can do. For themselves or anyone else. 

“Yeah,” Malcolm agrees aloud, “Gil… He’ll come through.”

The cop mentally adjusts his list of priorities. Bright’s voice sounds all wrong, and he’s gonna take a stab that it’s not just the aftereffects of the collapse anymore. 

“You’re not sounding so hot, kid,” he’s proud that he’s able to say it calmly, his voice even. Betraying none of the fear he’s feeling. 

It’s a bad angle, but with a little grunting and twisting he’s able to reach his own phone, tucked into his left jacket pocket. The screen is shattered, but offers a brief moment of hope as it blinks to life. It fizzles out again quickly at the realization that it too, has no reception. 

The cop shines the phone’s dim light on the wreckage separating them, feels his heart skip at the sheer size of it. It’s little more than a miracle it didn’t crush them both. He clicks it off quickly, unwilling to waste the battery. A quick check of his belt reveals that he lost his radio in the fall, too. 

Malcolm still hasn’t given him a straight answer, and profiler or not, that’s telling enough. 

“Talk to me. You hit your head,” he guesses, “what else?”

For the longest time, he doesn’t think Malcolm’s going to answer him. Which he was half-expecting, while what little optimism he has left is begging the kid not to fight him on this one. To just make things easy, for once.

It takes too long, too many counted rasps of air in the dust. 

“Hurts.”

JT’s eyes flutter shut. He’d put money on the situation being a hell of a lot worse than the kid wants to let on, and even that simple admission seems out of character enough. It says a lot about how bad things are looking.

“I’ll bet,” JT licks his dry lips, wills his hammering heart to calm down. “You bleeding?”  
  


“Yeah.”

The one word answers, soft and detached, are scaring him more than he wants to admit. Malcolm sounds zoned out, like he’s high and floating in his own head. 

“Where at? Where you bleeding from?”

Malcolm shifts, coughs, goes silent for too long. “M’fine,” he mutters, sounding like he really wants to believe it. 

The cop thinks of sitting with him at the warehouse, listening him repeat those words over and over like he could _ make _ them be true by sheer force of will. 

From what he has to go off of, and that’s not much, he’s now willing to put on money on the fact that Bright is packing a head injury at the very least. The confusion, uncoordinated sound to his movement, slurred words. If he’s lucky, that’s the worst of what they have to deal with for the moment. 

“Hey, listen,” JT winces as he reflexively tries to move, tries to turn his body into the darkness where he knows Bright is sitting. 

A few feet away. A hundred miles. Brick and mortar and iron and all the things he can’t know for sure. 

“We’re gonna make it out of here, alright, but I need you to make me a promise.” 

He’s not answered immediately and he won’t back down. “Can you do that for me?”

“Yeah, of course,” Malcolm finally says, and he sounds so young. So damn trusting and innocent. It makes JT’s chest hurt. 

“Good,” the cop swallows hard. Counts the beats between breaths, steadies himself. “No matter what happens… I need you to keep talking.”

**.**

It’s been four hours.

JT knows this because he’s checking his phone every few minutes compulsively, praying that at some point the _ No Service _ notification will disappear and they’ll finally catch a damn break. He watches the battery life drain slowly. Watches his hard-won optimism drain with it. 

He’s worried about Bright.

Not being able to see the kid is bad enough. Listening to his voice grow weaker, fade out at times completely, is a new kind of torture he’s not prepared for.

He tries to keep the kid talking. Asks him about work, about his time with the FBI, about anything he can think of to keep him engaged. It’s an awkward endeavor, not like making small talk in a crowd, at a party, sitting at the bar. 

Malcolm can’t seem to wrap that massive brain around simple questions—what’s your favorite ice cream; do most people have a favorite?—but latches on to the abstract like his head is stuffed with newspapers. Every decade, every era, from the Wall Street Journal to the Times. Endless streams of information, much of it so far removed from the field of criminal psychology that JT can’t even begin to guess how he picked it up. 

The kid’s rambling about stygian blue and imaginary colors and photoreceptor cells and _ retinitis pigmentosa _, and JT’s never felt happier to listen to him talk. 

Bright cuts himself off abruptly, a series of deep, wracking coughs ripping out of his chest, muffled like he’s trying to stay quiet. The sound is deteriorating, getting worse as time passes. 

“Sorry,” Bright gasps when he gets control of himself again.

“What for,” JT challenges him, proud that his voice is still strong and calm even when he doesn’t feel it. 

“I talk too much,” he says it so matter-of-fact, so plainly. “My therapist, she says it’s generalized anxiety. Oversharing.” 

JT blinks in the absolute blackness, the shift in gears enough to give him whiplash. Whatever intangible trail of thought and reasoning Malcolm is chasing through his own head, JT can’t follow. 

Malcolm sure as hell didn’t seem concerned about oversharing when he skipped from a detailed play-by-play description of an autopsy he’d once attended, through about nineteen lectures on psychopathic cognitive functions. 

“It makes people uncomfortable because I’m expending more information than they can process, and instead of making conversation they get overwhelmed and withdraw from the interaction,” Bright rattles on, and he sounds half-drunk or half-asleep. “S’why I can’t make friends. Well. S’lot of reasons….” 

He trails off, and his breathing is uneven, choppy and strained. He’s been sitting in the same spot for hours and it sounds like he just ran a marathon. 

The cop feels his chest constrict a little in unfamiliar empathy, and he’s normally not the type to indulge in that kind of thing. Prides himself on being hard and unaffected, impenetrable armor wrapped around a cold shell of a heart. It’s the nature of a hard-fought life. Too many years in a cold man’s profession. 

“Reciting your college textbooks ain’t exactly oversharing,” JT can’t help poking fun at him a little, choosing levity over clawing hopelessness. 

He thinks maybe Bright’s therapist would have something to say about his own unhealthy coping mechanisms coming out as dark humor. About being stubborn and defensive and too set in his ways to change. All the worst things he knows about himself, the things he wears close like a shield. 

_ This is who I am, take it or leave it. _

Never quite sure if he’s really trying to push everyone away, or silently hoping that someday, it won’t work anymore. Hoping that someone will stay.

“You got any kids?”

Another hard left. He isn’t sure if Malcolm is just relaxing around him, or whatever injuries he’s so determined to hide from the cop are finally taking their toll, cooking his brain from the inside out. 

JT’s flummoxed silence must have made Malcolm nervous, because he’s tripping over himself again. 

“Not trying to—you know—but realized... Never asked you that.” 

He sounds worse. Whether he’s getting too exhausted to hold up the act, or whatever blood he’s losing is just finally becoming too much for his body to handle. JT is hoping for option one. 

He takes mercy on the kid, and maybe it’s only because they’re both riding the fine line of terror and sustained adrenaline, sapping them of defenses, of pride and carefully-maintained social constructs. Maybe it’s the looming uncertainty of how this will all play out. Wondering silently if this is gonna be their last stand.

“Nah,” JT sighs out, “just never happened. Mom lives in Harlem. Sister’s in Jersey with her kids. That’s it for me.”

“So you never got married, never had kids…” Malcolm sounds breathless, his words dipping and blending as he slurs out syllables for the sheer sake of letting JT know he’s still there. Still hanging on. 

They’re well and truly alone. Trapped, for god only knows how long. Hidden from the world outside. 

The knowledge is enough to break down the cop’s walls, to cement the concept that despite their differences, despite their struggles to understand each other, they’re in the same boat. Trapped under the same rubble, for the same cause. Brothers in arms in all the ways that matter.

The facsimile JT is always so desperate to hold together, that damn wall of strength he holds around himself, cracks and slips. 

“Yeah, well. You see all these kids out there you know, doing this job… kids whose fathers beat ‘em, or beat their moms, or get ‘em dragged into shit kids should never see. Kinda makes you rethink havin’ a family.”

He’ll do anything, say anything, to keep the kid talking. Keep spitting out signs of life. And he’s not saying much, but he knows he doesn’t have to. Even the vague admission feels personal.

“You sound like Gil,” the words are quieter now, but JT doesn’t have trouble hearing it. 

“I’ll try to take that as a compliment.”

“There’s more to it,” Bright sounds far away, like maybe he doesn’t even know he’s talking. “Not just… seeing kids that had—” a wheezing breath interrupts him, and he struggles on, “—bad dads.”

JT sets his jaw, forces himself to relax it. Reminds himself that Bright’s effortless way of peeling back his brain and digging around inside isn’t a threat.

“You really are good at your job, I’ll give you that.”

“Sorry. Old habits.”

“Don’t apologize,” he surprises himself by saying. “I get it, man. Took me a long time. Like, a _ long _ ass time, but I get it. You can’t turn it off.”

The cop sighs heavily, wondering if he’ll ever be able to backtrack and clean up the mess he left in the wake of his own foolish pride and stubborn habits. If he’ll ever be able to prove he’s not _ all _ asshole, and make the kid believe it.

“Fine. You can say it,” JT offers at last, “you get a hall pass today.”

Malcolm is silent for a long time, like he isn’t sure if it’s genuine. Maybe it’s the lack of eye contact, not being able to read it on the cop’s face. Still walking on glass, and JT can’t blame him. 

The cop pushes on, and maybe it’s as much to get it off his own chest as it is to somehow offer comfort, solidarity. 

“Never knew him. Never even see a picture. Guess we had opposite problems, huh?” 

They’re in dangerous territory, for them both, and JT knows it. He clears his throat and shrugs, even knowing the kid can’t see him. 

“Least the only way my dad ever fucked with my head was, y’know… not being _ around _ to fuck with my head.”

He means it to sound lighthearted, conversational. Trying to keep both their spirits up when it would be so easy to crash into hopelessness. He’s not sure it works.

“I’m sorry.”

JT blinks in the darkness. It’s not like Bright to say shit like that, to offer hollow words like bandaids for old wounds. Small talk and empty platitudes.

“S’alright,” he says back quietly, wondering what it all means. What Malcolm is actually saying, if he’ll ever be able to really speak his language. 

“Guess… neither of us ever had a chance, huh,” Bright laughs mirthlessly in the darkness, the sound wet and broken. “Always up against the psychological impossibility of pleasing distant father figures… mistakes we’re doomed to repeat. Our only role models impossibly toxic. The ultimate Catch 22.”

The soft sounds dissolve into harsh coughing, and even knowing it won’t do him any good the cop shifts and shoves at the beam across his leg, desperate in a way he’s never experienced. When that becomes a futile endeavor, he tries to pull his boot out against the impossible angle. The gap is too narrow, the leather and rubber encasing his right foot too thick. 

For all he knows Malcolm could be bleeding out a few feet away from him and he’s stuck here, helpless. 

It’s too much like Garmsir all over again, like laying pinned under an armored truck listening to gunfire kick up puffs of sand around his helmet and just wondering when it’s going to end. Praying for it. Feeling something too close to anger when it never does, just pain and fury and despair. Wondering if he could get free, if maybe he could fight. Help someone, _ do something. _

He grunts in frustration as the damn thing won’t move, won’t even budge. 

Bright is still wheezing and hacking, like he can’t get it under control anymore. 

“Hey,” JT calls out harshly in the emptiness, desperate to interrupt what he can only hope isn’t the sound of Malcolm dying next to him, just out of arm’s reach. “Hey, kid.”

He waits for the coughing to subside, and it sounds like it’s a struggle and a half for the profiler to bite it back. To force his body to accept mind over matter like he’s always done. 

He waits in the quiet, just listening to the wet, ragged breaths that scare him so much. Licks his lips and tries to rally his flagging courage.

“Can I tell you something,” he turns his head towards the wall between them, knowing he’s probably making a mistake. 

Bright is quiet, like he’s still trying to pull it together, still trying to be strong. There’s a soft rustle in the stillness, and it says a lot about him that JT can almost _ see _ him nodding, like he’s forgotten that the cop can’t see him. 

JT’s mouth feels dry. He’s nervous, even though his confessions in the dark should be the least of his concerns in the moment. 

“I, uh—I had a relationship once. A good one...” he breaks off, taking a steadying breath. He wonders if Bright knows it’s the first time these words have ever left his lips. 

“I lost him in Afghanistan, too.”

JT can feel his pulse in his eardrums. He’s almost shaky with nerves and the realization that he can never unsay what he’s just said. Can’t ever take it back, tear the words out of the dusty air and stuff them back down his throat. 

“You’re only telling me that because you think we’re dying,” Malcolm points out unnecessarily. He doesn’t sound fazed in the slightest, doesn’t react like so many other people would. So many other cops. 

JT swallows hard. “Not a chance. Not today, we’re not.”

“You were worried about telling me,” Bright monotones between uneven pulls of air, “thought I’d judge you for your sexual preferences.”

It’s a clinical response, and JT’s lips twitch into a smile at the familiarity of it all. At the very least, the kid is still with it enough to put that analytical brain to work. It no longer even bothers him, the cop realizes with a start. 

If anything, it’s the kind of complete understanding that nobody has offered him in years. 

“But I told you anyway.”

Conversations that were once unwelcome have become almost cathartic. Knowing that he doesn’t really have to try that hard to explain himself, doesn’t have to dig too deep for understanding or reasoning. All he needs is the bravery to say a few words, to open himself up an inch or two and let that impossible light shine in. Illuminating every secret, every shadowed corner. 

The same uncanny insight that he once resented so deeply has now become his saving grace. 

It’s a lot to wrap his head around. 

“See, I always knew you liked me,” Bright’s voice is getting thinner, weaker. 

“Don’t flatter yourself,” the cop allows himself a grin, his head falling back against the stone behind him. He’s strangely relieved, like a weight has lifted off his chest he never knew was there. 

“Don’t worry,” Bright slurs, and it manages to sound cheerful in spite of everything. “I’ll take it to my grave.”

“Like hell you will. You’re gonna be keeping your mouth shut for a lot longer than that, I got anything to say about it.”

The silence is back, and the fact that Bright is either too hurt or too exhausted to keep up the conversation sends icy spears of panic through the cop’s chest. 

Somewhere in the destruction, JT can hear water dripping slowly. Maybe a busted pipe. It gives him something to focus on that isn’t the crushing weight pinning his leg, the sound of rattled air and broken bones.

“Was’he a good guy?”

The words are innocent. JT’s eyes shutter as he fights his own traitorous heart.

It’s been over a decade, he thinks. He’s moved on. He’s a different person now. Laid old ghosts to rest. 

He thinks of bagpipes and folded flags over cherry-red wood. Of twenty-one shots fired overhead while clouds of warm white smoke drift in the early morning air. When he closes his eyes, he can still smell gunpowder.

“Yeah,” he says honestly, “he really was.” 

“Good,” Malcolm breathes into the dust. 

JT wants to say something else. Maybe offer a thank you—he’s not sure what for—or at the very least conjure up something positive to keep Bright awake, keep him talking and hoping. The words desert him. 

The cop swallows hard, the surreal situation settling heavy on his shoulders. 

The truth is, he can’t make any empty promises that they’ll get out of here. Can’t guarantee that anyone is going to find them before they bleed out or suffocate. He knows better than to try. Knows the kid would see right through it.

“Just think,” he finally sighs into the gloom, “we get outta here… what a badass story we’re gonna have to tell everybody.”

The pipe is still dripping somewhere. The air is absolutely still around him. 

“Bright,” he tries again, holding his breath and straining to hear any signs of life. 

Malcolm doesn’t answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said Tuesdays were update nights... but I'm full-speed ahead with this monster at the moment and I couldn't wait to post more.
> 
> Thank you again to everyone reading, it's literally like a writer's high to get kudos/comments from you guys. I'm beyond happy that people are invested in this story, and I hope I don't disappoint as it continues. 
> 
> See last chapter for the #Brimel discord link, we'd love to have you come join!


	6. Chapter Six

Losing his single remaining lifeline to Bright sends JT into a tailspin he’s later grateful nobody is around to see. The tide of sheer panic he’s been barely keeping the lid on through the long, hopeless hours breaks him. He can physically feel it as his white-knuckled grip on his own sanity snaps, dissolves completely. 

He spirals. Screams the kid’s name until his throat is raw and aching. Calls him every name he can think of and makes up a few new ones on the way. Begs, threatens, pleads. 

He pounds on the concrete holding him trapped in place, helpless, with both fists until warm blood is sliding down his wrists. And all he can think of is that same blood dripping out of Bright, somewhere in the darkness. Alone. 

By the time he brings himself back around he’s almost hyperventilating, the sheer helplessness of the situation crushing him more surely than steel and concrete ever could. The cop forces himself to breathe, aghast at his own breakdown. 

_ Box breathing _, he tells himself with his eyes squeezed shut. Breathe in, count four beats, hold four beats. Out four. Hold four. Repeat. He’s survived so much worse than this moment, so many times before. 

_ Control your breathing, control your mind. _

It works, eventually. He’s shaky with adrenaline and terror but he’s thinking clearer, his brain rapidly filing down the list of options. And there aren’t many. 

Short of sawing off his own leg, an option he wouldn’t survive even if he miraculously had a chainsaw handy, he can’t see a way to free himself. Even his sidearm is conspicuously absent from his hip holster, no doubt lost in the fall somewhere. He’s not strong enough to lift the debris, and even if he were the angle is impossible. 

Concrete at his back, to his right, across his knees. Imprisoning him. 

The cop kicks out with his left foot, his continued struggle grinding away at the crumbling rubble, but his right still remains locked in place. There’s an indent of some kind in the concrete, preventing him from sliding his trapped boot to the side. If he tries to pull towards himself it becomes painful, almost unbearably so. That doesn’t keep him from trying, leaving him soaked in sweat and panting for air. 

He can feel the bones in his ankle shifting and grinding, screaming in protest. Fragile under countless tons of immovable weight. 

A dark thought comes to him, and he turns it over and over in his mind as he listens to the sounds of Bright _ not breathing _ somewhere too close, close enough to imagine him slumped against the other side of a solid stone wall. 

Without permission, his mind catapults him back through the weeks and months to a dark apartment filled with chemicals and strange tools, to watching Bright make a split second decision. Taking an axe to a living, breathing human like he was chopping up a steak. Saving Nico’s life, and likely both his own and JT’s in one ballsy moment. 

Shellshocked by the encounter, JT had immidiatley pegged the kid for a psychopath. Figured there was no way any normal person could do something like that. 

But in the long run, the kid just did what had to be done. Made lightning-quick judgements and carried them out without flinching. The horror of the entire scenario aside… it was exactly what soldiers were trained to do. 

This time, the cop thinks, it’s his turn. 

A cold, gut-deep resolves fills him, calming him. 

Taking several rapid breaths through his mouth, he braces both hands against the slab of concrete in front of him and tries to focus on that. 

Making tough choices. Doing whatever it takes to get them out, the consequences be damned. 

It’s not much of an argument in his own mind. If he has to choose between sitting here, knowing Malcolm is dead or dying a few feet away, or tearing himself to pieces trying to save them… Well. His decision has already been made for him. 

“Kid,” he breathes into the silence, uncaring that Malcolm will never hear him, “hold on for me. I’m coming for you.” 

Box breathing. Four beats. In and hold. Out and hold. He allows himself one cycle to calm his mind. 

Both bloody palms braced against the harsh stone, he clenches his jaw. Bends his right knee in towards his body. Ignores the spiking pain as his ankle meets unyielding stone, his body’s warning that he’s asking more of it than it can withstand. 

He hears a sickening _ pop _ and crunch as his right ankle finally gives way, tendons and ligaments bending to the force. Hears himself cry out in pain, bites his lip until he tastes blood, but he doesn’t stop. Not until he feels his boot finally pull free of that unyielding weight.

The cop stays there for a moment, his eyes watering, chest heaving for air. He’s lightheaded and sweating through his shirt, but he made it, he thinks. Did what had to be done. 

Gradually pulling his legs free is a slow process, and almost unbearably agonizing. He has to pause for breath a few times, sharp pain shooting up his jaw as he grinds his teeth together and counts four beats. Breathes. And keeps going. 

JT’s ready to scream in frustration by the time he feels cool air around his ankle, plants his hands on the stone and finally, _ finally _ heaves himself up on top of it. He lays there for a moment, his head spinning. The muscles in his legs are cramped and cold and his right ankle is _ screaming _ at him, warning him that whatever damage he just did to his own joint, it’s not gonna be something he can walk off. 

Looking back, he’s not sure how he makes it over the wall. Bloodied fingers scrabbling for purchase on crumbling stone, his arms doing most of the work for him as he hauls himself over the edge and lands hard on his shoulder on the other side. 

Despite his best efforts he feels his right boot bounce off the floor and nearly blacks out. Comes back to his senses curled in on himself, clutching his leg above the knee as he rides out the pain of impact. 

There’s no time. No time for weakness or recovery or laying there in the dust trying to grit his teeth through it all. 

He pulls himself up onto his elbows, dragging his useless leg behind him as he reaches out, sweeping his bloodied hands left and right across the rubble.

When his searching fingers finally land on fabric and warm flesh, he about jumps out of his skin. It’s the first sensation he’s come across after hours in the dark that isn’t cold stone and crumbling debris and he latches onto it, pulling himself closer as he grunts for air. 

“Bright,” he hears himself rasp out, and almost doesn’t recognize his own voice. “Bright, answer me goddamn you…”

The cop manages to pull himself upright onto one knee, biting his lip as he jostles his destroyed ankle in the process. He reaches for his phone with shaky hands, using the dimming screen for a moment of light to assess the damage.

His stomach flips when he sees Malcolm. 

The kid is pale—but he’s always pale—a ghostly sallowness to his skin that the cop can’t blame on the grey, choking dust. The profiler is propped up in the rubble with his back to that massive slab of stone, his chin hanging to his chest, his hair in his eyes. He’s covered in blood.

JT fights back a wave of nausea, and it’s harder than it should be. There’s so much blood. 

It’s dripping from his hairline in macabre streams down his jaw. Staining his shirt. The worst of it is a dark, seeping pool of crimson on the left side of Malcolm’s ribs. The kid’s hand, laying limp and lifeless at his side, is coated in it. When he passed out he must have lost his hold keeping pressure on the wound, and it’s slowly dripping into a pool beneath him. 

_ Drip. Drip. _

In the eerie quiet it’s the only sound. Slow and rhythmic. Like water dripping. 

Through all the long, useless hours trapped in the dark, he’d been listening to Bright bleed out four feet away from him. It takes all of JT’s remaining willpower to keep himself from heaving on the spot. 

The cop’s hand is shaking as it he tries to recover from his moment of shock, placing his palm over the wound. Feels bones shift under his touch. He knows he can’t be gentle, can’t chance any more blood loss, but that doesn’t make him feel better about as he presses hard against torn and damaged skin.

“I’m here,” he mutters senselessly, more for his own sake than for Bright’s, “I’ve got you, alright? Just hang in there...”

With his other hand he reaches up to tilt the kid’s head back against the wall behind him, dipping his fingers into the hollow of his neck to get a pulse. It’s weak and thready, but it’s there. 

Stubborn as ever, the profiler is hanging on. Always fighting. 

The cop makes a conscious effort to unclench his jaw, to let the adrenaline drain out of his tense muscles. Raises his free hand to gently touch, patting Malcolm’s bloody cheek as he tries to coax him awake.

“Come on, kid,” he huffs into the gloom, “you picked a hell of a time to finally get some sleep, huh? Tryna give me a damn heart attack.”

It’s almost physically painful for him to be rougher with his movements, to gently slap the kid’s cheek. He figures Malcolm will forgive him later if either of them make it that far. 

“Rise and shine, Bright,” he’s louder now, more demanding. “Not a request. Come on.”

Malcolm finally stirs and coughs, long eyelashes fluttering against translucent skin. A sliver of blue peeks through, and this time JT’s stomach starts doing somersaults for an entirely different reason. Those eerie eyes drift around incoherently for several beats, before dragging across and meeting JT’s brown ones. 

“Hey,” the kid breathes with a lethargic smile, like he’s not bleeding out in a shadowed prison under countless tons of stone. 

“Hey yourself, you dumb fuck,” JT lets out, his voice weak with relief. “You were just gonna go and die on me, huh?”

“That—that wasn’t exactly part of the plan,” Malcolm slurs, and the cop can’t figure out for the life of him how he’s still _ smiling _.

“Yeah, when does shit ever go to plan around here?” JT is hyper-aware of the warmth seeping through his fingers, of the chilling knowledge that there’s next to nothing he can do to stop it. 

“One time I planned a surprise party for my mother,” Bright babbles on, blinking hard like he’s trying to keep himself awake, “but she stayed out late… and we waited on her for almost three hours before she came home… most everyone had left by then…”

JT laughs, and it comes out sounding a little more hysterical than he’d like, a little more out of control. “You literally just described another plan that didn’t work.”

“Guess I did…”

Reluctantly, JT turns the phone screen off and they’re plunged back into the dark, labored breathing and pounding pulses loud between them. He hates not being able to see Bright, to make sure those crystal-blue eyes are still open and fighting, but he can’t risk wasting the battery. 

“How—’re you okay? How did you…” Malcolm’s unsteady voice is confused, can’t finish his sentence. His lungs sound wet and rattled. It’s worse up close.

“Make it over here?” JT takes a wild guess at the rest. “Trust me, you don’t wanna know. Was thinkin’ of a crazy kid swinging an axe around like a maniac. Kinda lit a fire under me.”

“That sounds—that guy sounds nuts, you should fire him.”

“If it was up to me he’da been out on his ass a long time ago, trust me. Good thing it ain’t up to me.” JT shifts on his good knee, the unbearable weight bearing down on his shoulders lightening for a moment. “Don’t tell him I said this, but uh... He’s come in handy a time or two.” 

“Shhhh,” Malcolm still sounds lazy and strangely happy, like he’s too out of it to even grasp the grim situation they’re still in. “Don’t tell.”

“That’s right,” the cop humors him, “not a damn word. Why didn’t you tell me you were losing blood like a busted faucet?”

“Not much you could do,” JT feels the kid try to shrug half-heartedly. “Didn’t wanna worry you.”

“Well, you worried me.” The cop immediately regrets saying it, but figures it’s probably the least embarrassing thing he’s said tonight. He tries awkwardly to save face and he’s not even sure why. “Gil’d have my head on a stick if I let anything happen to you.”

Bright doesn’t seem to register that, coughing weakly. The sound is painful, and JT can feel the kid’s ribs seizing and shifting under him. Warm blood trickles against his skin. As terrifying as it is to feel the profiler literally bleeding out through his fingers, it’s still vastly preferable to being trapped in the dark a few feet away and helpless. 

JT reaches blindly in the shadows, finding Bright’s hand. He lifts it and presses it against the oozing wound, knowing the kid is smart enough to get the message to keep pressure. 

“Think this was’is test run,” Malcolm slurs absently. 

It takes JT a second to realize he’s talking about Grezny again, his brain back to work like it’s his default setting. The cop huffs as he makes quick work of peeling off his jacket. Between the nerves and his own physical exertion, he’d lost track of how cold it had become until the crisp air meets his sweat-dampened skin. 

“Must’a been,” he humors him, gently lifting the kid’s hand away from his ribs again. He presses the jacket against the wound instead, turned inside out in the hopes that the cloth lining will do a better job than the slick leather exterior at soaking up moisture. 

“Makes’ense, a rookie explosives manufacturer… ‘d need a safe place to test out the ‘ffectiveness of unstable—s’that your jacket?”

“Ain’t much, but it’s all I got,” JT resists rolling his eyes. At least Malcolm has the energy to be rambling again, which he’s more than willing to count as a good sign.

“Oh,” Bright breathes unsteadily, goes silent for a beat. “I’ll ruin it.”

JT wishes there was enough light for Malcolm to see his face, so he could properly communicate how idiotic he thinks the kid is being. 

“It’s a jacket,” he finally says flatly, “I can get another one.”

“Yeah’but… this one’s yours… had it for’a long time.”

The cop is long past being bewildered by Malcolm’s uncanny observance. He sighs, dropping his shoulders with a nod, even knowing it won’t do any good. Bright can’t see him. And he’s not sure why the kid is fixating on the damn jacket of all things given their current circumstances, but he thinks it shouldn’t really surprise him.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll get it dry cleaned. What’s another weird stain, huh?”

Malcolm wheezes, his fingers searching over quickly-dampening leather to lay over JT’s hand. The cop feels his chest squeeze at the simple contact. It’s innocent and strangely intimate, like it’s meant to comfort him.

“Y’hear that?”

JT freezes at the unexpected comment, holding his breath. He can’t hear anything but the unsettling rattle of breath fighting its way out of damaged lungs, his own pounding heartbeat. 

“Chance you might be hallucinating, kid.”

“No… listen…”

The cop humors him, straining his ears in the dead silence. He’s ready to make another crack about blood loss and paranoia, anything really to keep both their moods up. 

The jab dies on his lips as he starts to hear it, too. 

There’s a distant wave of white noise. Far-off and almost imperceptible, until it’s punctuated by the sound of intermittent beeping, like a truck backing up. His heart jumps into his throat. 

“S’that…”

A grinding roar comes next, like pieces of shattered rubble dragging on concrete. It’s louder. Closer. 

“Holy shit.”

“They found us.”

**.**

It’s another two hours before emergency crews reach them. 

JT is almost ready to cry by the time the bright lights shine down on them from far above, and he blinks back the odd sensation as he hobbles upright on his good leg and waves, exhausted, at the blurred silhouettes of rescue workers.

Bright has long since lost the energy to speak, so JT does instead. Listening to the crews work to move half-ton chunks of rock, he spouts inane nonsense and useless syllables for the sheer sake of sound, relentless in his commands for the kid to at least keep his eyes open. 

It’s a battle Malcolm finally loses as he’s strapped onto an orange backboard, lifted up into the harsh glare of floodlights against the night sky.

They pull JT up next, and he’s barely made it out into blessedly fresh air before Dani hits him like a linebacker. She holds onto him like she never expected to see him alive again, and he’s shaky with relief as he hugs her back. 

She pulls back to look at him, and he can tell she’s been crying. Trying to hide it and doing a shit job.

JT feels emotionally shattered, exhausted beyond repair, and it must be written all over his face. She makes a broken sound and hugs him again. 

“We never made it inside,” she tells him, her voice rough with stress. “Goddamn it, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” the cop nods against her shoulder, gripping her with all the strength he has left. “It’s okay.”

He blinks in the chaos as she finally lets him go, taking in the fleet of fire engines, backhoes, and ambulances surrounding the ruins. Cops and firefighters swarming the scene. 

JT catches sight of paramedics hovering over a gurney, affixing an oxygen mask to Malcolm and talking in urgent tones as they load him into the nearest ambulance. Gil is there within arms reach, clambering into the back with the crew. 

“Fuck, Dani,” JT breathes, catching a fleeting glimpse of his own bloody jacket draped over narrow hips as the ambulance doors close, “I really need a drink.”

She laughs, and it’s an echo of his own mindless stress and nervous energy.

“I can’t believe you survived that,” she reluctantly takes a step back as a gurney is wheeled over for him next. 

“That makes two of us,” he manages to say. 

He stares at the remains of the parking garage, all odd angles and jutting half-pillars oozing smoke, and thinks of the ruins of desert warzones. 

A decade ago. A heartbeat ago. 

His overtaxed body all but gives up on him after that. JT distantly registers the buzz of paramedics and penlights, poking and prodding and intense questions he answers like a robot. It’s like he’s watching it all happen from outside his own body. Doesn’t even feel it as he’s helped onto a second gurney, doesn’t feel the pain of his numb ankle as he’s C-collared and strapped in. Loaded into an ambulance. 

A plastic mask rests over his mouth. An IV slips into his arm. 

He doesn’t remember the ride to the hospital. 

Thanks to exhaustion or too-strong pain meds or some strange combination of the two, JT falls into restless unconsciousness. He’s plagued by strange dreams, the kind he hasn’t had in years. This time he has flashes of helpless moments soaked in carnage, watching Malcolm bleed out under his hands. 

_ “If you love someone you’ll do anything for them, even if it hurts you. That’s love.” _

It’s Malcolm’s voice in his head like a memory, inlaid over pools of blood and the way ribs shouldn’t move. JT can feel his lips in motion, air leaving his lungs like he’s screaming, but he can’t hear the sound of it. 

He’s drowning in exhaustion, in helplessness, in terror. 

When he comes back to himself, he’s in a hospital bed listening to something beep rhymically somewhere close to his head. There’s a dim light that feels too bright shining in through a single curtainless window. The room is empty.

He has time to panic briefly, overwhelmed by the strange environment and the urge that he needs to be somewhere else, doing _ something _, before sleep takes him again without warning. 

This time he doesn’t dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at me totally lying about update speed. The next one may be be next Tuesday, or it might be Friday... don't listen to a word I say. I'm full of shit.
> 
> So this story is going to be long. LONG, long. I have so insanely much planned out for these boys that the plot summary document alone is currently sitting at 13 pages. A lot of that inspiration is thanks to your amazing feedback, so thank you again, from the bottom of my heart. 
> 
> P.S. Come join us on Discord so we can more effectively brainstorm! Discord link at the bottom of Chapter Four.


	7. Chapter Seven

The ceiling is old and colorless. Thick squares of corrugated tile. 

JT is, he thinks to himself, getting pretty damn tired of waking up in new places every time he opens his eyes. 

He’s suffering from the kind of heavy, smothering disorientation that generally follows too much sleep, his body stiff and uncooperative. His mouth tastes like cotton and there’s something awkward and uncomfortable wrapped around his right leg. The ceiling’s changed from before, alerting him he’s already been moved to another room.

The cop grunts in discomfort as he tries to lever himself up to look down at his foot. A gray plastic boot and velcro straps. Everything hurts, like the day after a good fight. Bumps and bruises and strained muscles all clamoring for attention once the adrenaline fades out. 

There’s a blur of motion at the open door. Dani’s curly hair bobs dramatically as she peeks into the room. 

“Oh shit, you’re awake!”

She moves faster than his lagging vision can track, and it’s muscle memory to half-heartedly return her quick embrace as she dips over the bed to squeeze his shoulders. She smells like coffee and dry shampoo. 

She releases him, sitting on the edge of the mattress, carefully avoiding the boot encasing his lower leg. 

“You’re not turning into a hugger on me, are you,” he tries to joke. His voice is rough and his throat raw with disuse.

She snorts in a decisively unladylike manner. “Was thinking about picking it up, actually. But only in extreme life-or-death situations. Can’t wear it out.”

“So like once a week, then.”

“Tops,” her relieved grin is infectious.

“Did I… did I fucking pass out?” The cop is mortified at the thought, at the idea that he was able to get any rest in the first place.

“Nah, doc said it was just sleep. Your whole ‘tough guy’ bit is still intact, don’t worry.”

He huffs at her, making an effort to sit up. She’s considerate enough to reach down and hand him the wired remote to the bed. He pushes the button and tilts the mattress up until he’s comfortably seated. 

“Well. Welcome back to the land of the living,” Dani’s dry sarcasm is back in full force, and he’s relieved to see that she’s managed to pull herself back together after the harrowing events of the previous day. Always ready to bounce back. “Good thing, too. You need a shower.”

He makes a face at her, flexing his bandaged hands experimentally as he stares down at them. 

“They must’a given me the good stuff.”

“Try the _ really _ good stuff.”

JT doesn’t answer, trying to shake the cobwebs out of his head. Dani hasn’t volunteered much information, and he’s not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. 

Gil’s absence doesn’t escape him, and for some reason that sticks in his brain like a thorn. 

“How’s the LT,” he hesitates to ask.

“He’s been in and out,” Dani sighs, running a hand through her curls. It’s something she does a lot when she’s tired, and JT can’t help but wonder if the fact that he knows this means Bright’s been rubbing off on him. 

“You just missed him,” she doesn’t seem to notice him spacing out, “bouncing back and forth, don’t think he’s slept in two days—”

“Bright,” JT interrupts, “where is he?”

Dani purses her lips, and for a moment the expression sends JT’s heart plummeting straight through the floor. She must’ve seen it on his face, because she’s quick to catch herself.

“Oh no, no he’s okay… mostly. He’s in the ICU, okay? But he’s gonna be fine.”

The cop releases a shaky breath, pressing a hand to his temple as he tries to take it all in. “Fuck, Dani—”

“Look, you saved his life down there, for real. Don’t beat yourself up, cause I know you’re about to start.”

“You don’t know what it was like.” JT takes a few shaky breaths, unable to look at her. He feels it all crashing back onto him, like he’s free-falling into a concrete prison filled with blood and defeat all over again. 

Dani falls silent after that, but she reaches out and takes one of his hands. And she’s not the emotional type either; hell, that’s what he loves about her. But he’s never been more grateful to not be alone.

It takes him a few minutes to pull his shattered edges back together, to reach for the pieces of himself that slipped away from him in the dust and darkness. It feels like fighting a war in his own head. Draining. Out of control.

He wasn’t expecting to get hit with everything all at once like this, to be blindsided by the force of it all. He silently wonders if the pain meds dripping out of an IV bag by his shoulder might have something to do with it. 

_ Drip. Drip. _

It flings him back into the suffocating pit of shadows, into moments where he was listening to a broken pipe drip that was never a broken pipe at all, but Bright’s blood. Too much blood. Rivers and pools of it. He’s drowning. 

“I think I’m gonna puke,” he says.

Dani stares at him, finally figures out that he’s being serious. She darts across the room for a plastic trashcan, shoving it into his lap as he starts to heave.

The room is spinning when he finally finishes, and he didn’t have anything in his stomach to come up in the first place but his body isn’t convinced. He feels nauseous and too warm. It passes quickly.

Dani occupies herself during this embarrassing episode by promptly calling a nurse, who calls a doctor, who wanders in to read medical jargon off a chart the cop can’t understand. Tells JT he’s probably having a reaction to the medication, that it should recede with time. 

The cop doesn’t know how to explain it didn’t have a damn thing to do with the meds, so he just nods and listens and keeps his mouth shut. 

The doctor reads off his prognosis, which all told, isn’t nearly as bad as it feels. The standard array of bumps and bruises. Abrasions to his hands and arms. A gash on his skull that took four stitches. Dislocated ankle. Dehydration and shock. 

The worst is past.

All business in a white jacket thrown over wrinkled scrubs, the man asks him to recount how he obtained each injury. JT robotically walks him through what he remembers. There’s not much. He’s straightforward about it, like he’s writing a police report. 

Dani, eavesdropping shamelessly, stands in the corner. It’s impossible to miss her quiet reaction as he explains what happened to his ankle. 

JT zones out at some point, comes back to it when the doctor finishes droning on about… something. Fires off some parting farewell and heads out of the room like he has better places to be. He probably does. 

Dani stares at him for a long moment, and JT sighs when the pressure of her gaze starts to get a little overbearing. 

“What, Dani?” 

She raises her eyebrows, faking casualness as she slowly steps towards the bed. “You broke your own ankle?”  
  


“Dislocated, technically. You heard the Doc.”

“Dude. I don’t know whether to be impressed or freaked out.” 

JT makes a face. “Little column A, little column B?”

“So ah. Would this be a good time for some news? Or you still feeling out of it?”

“I swear to god, if you don’t spit it out—”

“Grezny. He’s in custody.”

JT feels all the air leave his lungs in a shuddering breath. He can’t find his voice to answer.

“ESU pulled him in an hour ago; got a hit off the tip line after they aired his picture on the 10 o’clock.”

The cop nods, licking his dry lips. “That’s… wow.”

“Yeah. They’re keeping his arrest out of the news, what with this whole second-killer bit still on the line.”

“Is he talking?”

“So far,” she presses her lips into a hard line and shakes her head, “not a damn word.”

**.**

  
  


Dani spends the day with him, and he’s equally grateful and annoyed by that in turns. 

He grills her about Bright, every nerve mindlessly on edge. Almost twenty-four hours have passed since they escaped their hellish prison, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like he had Malcolm’s blood on his hands a heartbeat ago, and he just _ blinked _and woke up somewhere else. It feels too recent, too raw, too surreal.

She’s purposefully vague about Malcolm’s injuries, reminding JT repeatedly that _ he’s fine, he’s fine, _ and the more times she says it the less he believes it. It’s not her fault, he tells himself. It’s not anyone’s fault. 

But the fact they’re keeping the kid in the Intensive Care Unit is more than enough to put him on edge, to tell him that whatever Bright is right now, he’s not _ fine. _

They bring in food at some point. He consumes it mechanically and tries not to gag. Dani loudly eats a bag of chips out of the vending machine, her feet propped up on the bed as she slumps in the chair. 

They turn on the news, watch in silence as a sharp-dressed, slick-haired Reichman representative delivers a press release. It’s all carefully practiced sympathy and selective imprecision, a political move to get out ahead of all the bad publicity.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims. We pledge our full support to the NYPD as they conduct an ongoing investigation into these tragic events,” the man says into the camera. A news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen reads _ Alexander Drake, _labeling him as the CEO of Reichman Chemicals. He’s too confident for real sympathy.

JT scoffs at the television, letting his fork fall onto his tray as he gives up trying to stomach the lukewarm hospital food. 

“They’re writing off the explosion as a structural collapse,” Dani says around a mouthful of hot cheetos, “mayor doesn’t want everyone freaking out about a bomber.”

“Like they ain’t already freaking out,” the cop sighs. 

“It’s New York. Nobody blinks at a double homicide anymore.”

“Not exactly your garden-variety homicide, is it,” JT shakes his head, gestures at the TV. “Did anyone talk to this guy? He looks shady as fuck.” 

“Shhh. Settle down there cripple, you’re not at work.”

“Well I should be. Why the hell are they keeping me in here, anyways?”

Dani makes air quotes with one hand. “Observation.”

She generously pretends not to notice when JT pulls his IV out of his arm and tosses it away. They watch the news and make small talk in relative peace. The windows slowly dim as the sun makes an early disappearance. 

When Dani wanders off to find the cafeteria coffee shop, JT hauls himself out of bed. 

He’s fully back in his own brain again, shaking off the lingering vestiges of too much sleep and sedation. There’s a pair of crutches by the bathroom door, and he’s been eyeing them since the second he woke up. 

Stiff from too long inactive, his body is sore and uncoordinated. He’s too stubborn to let that stop him. The wall makes a handy stabilizer as he edges along it, hopping awkwardly to avoid putting any weight on his hobbled leg. He spends a few minutes reacquainting himself with using crutches, grunting as he smacks them against his awkward plastic boot a time or two. It’s a less than graceful process, but he feels confident he can get around on them well enough. 

The hallway is empty, an abandoned nurses station a few yards down. He makes it to the elevators before Dani returns, and counts that as a rare stroke of luck. 

He needs to see Bright. 

Just get eyes on him, that’s all. Scratch the itch that’s all too eager to remind him that the last time he saw Malcolm, the kid had one foot in the grave and was sliding fast. 

JT knows he’s being ridiculous, maybe even reckless. Isn’t sure how far he can wander around the place in hospital robes before someone tries to send him back to his room. The fact of the matter is, he doesn’t much care. 

In his mind, he knows Malcolm is fine. Logically, he’s more than aware. The kid’s somewhere resting, receiving much-needed medical care after their too-recent brush with death. 

He _ knows _ that.

The problem is, logic turns off when your partner’s blood is seeping through your fingers. When the entire universe funnels down into trying to live through a few minutes at a time, _survive_ _at all costs_. And he knows from experience it doesn’t always turn itself back on again when the threat ends. 

Whatever’s hard-wired into him to survive, to make impossible choices under impossible pressure, it won’t allow him to operate on simple logic right now. It’s been a long time—years maybe—since he experienced anything like it. It’s a primal drive, a long-rusted engine that kick-started in his chest in the endless hours under a hundred tons of rubble. 

The faithful soldier’s lizard brain hissing back to life, long sleeping. Never dead.

It’s what pulls him like a magnetic force to the first floor, down endless mismatched tile hallways, squinting at the signs and arrows mounted on the walls in distant intervals. He’s been to Elmhurst a hundred times in the past; it’s the closest Level One trauma center to the precinct, after all. It’s never felt more like a maze. 

Eventually he finds a map, and combined with the signs that gets him headed in the right direction. 

He passes Malcolm’s mother in the hallway, walking in the opposite direction. Presumably coming from the ICU. She’s striding brusquely in towering black heels, talking on the phone as she walks. JT doesn’t try to make eye contact. He’s almost positive she wouldn’t recognize him even if he did. 

JT talks his way through the ICU security by telling them he’s Bright’s partner. It seems to work. It’s only as he heads down the dim circular hallway, lined with glass-walled rooms and pulled curtains, that he realizes the trauma nurses may have completely misunderstood the context of the word _ partner _ in this particular situation. 

The room is dark. JT quietly slips through the drawn curtains, swinging himself forward towards the oversized bed. 

Bright’s alive.

Whiter than the sheets he’s laying on, frail and bruised. Breathing through a respirator, still intubated. Unconscious. Dead to the world, but tangibly _ here _.

It’s as still as JT has ever seen him, and it feels all wrong. Malcolm is a lot of things, but peaceful isn’t one of them. There’s a thick silence wrapped around his thin form like a cocoon, and without even realizing he’s doing it JT finds himself staring. Tracing the ugly purple edges of a massive bruise on a sharp jaw with his eyes, the healing lines of a split lip. The limp curve of a pale hand laying on the mattress, knuckles battered and scraped. 

He feels responsible for the kid, he realizes. It’s a sentiment that defies explanation. That after all this time, so much history between them and most of it ugly, Bright has managed to crawl under his skin like this… it’s unsettling. Confusing. 

It makes him wonder, not for the first time, if he could have done more. Somehow prevented the entire thing. Caught up to Malcolm if he’d been a little faster, got them out of that stairwell before the walls came down. Maybe if he’d paid better attention he would have spotted Grezny in the crowd himself, back in front of the apartment complex. A million little details that could have shifted imperceptibly and changed everything. 

Despite the turmoil in his mind, he feels that dark, primal part of himself start to relax as he stands there. Bleeding a tension out of every limb he didn’t realize he was holding. 

Like the snake living in his chest, constricting his lungs, has started to finally unwind. 

He’s not sure how long he simply stands there. Feeling his heart beat in sync with Bright’s slowly chirping monitor. Caught in a trance. He doesn’t know how to fight or interpret what he’s feeling so he doesn’t try. Let’s himself drift in it, weightless and buoyant. 

Bright is alive. Safe. JT is alive. Safe. 

The air is warm and clear of choking grey dust. There’s not a single fleck of seeping, cloying blood on his hands, or in Malcolm’s hair, or falling out of his body. 

Alive. Safe.

JT jumps when a polite knock sounds on the glass, a formality to announce her presence as a nurse enters with a rolling cart. She apologizes for interrupting, but isn’t sorry enough not to kick him out of the room so she can change her patient’s bandages. 

He retreats to the other side of the glass wall, still strangely reluctant to let the kid out of his sight. It’s an instinct that goes wildly against everything he knows for sure: that this is a safe place. That Malcolm is in good hands. That he’s stable, not about to blink out of existence like a candle flickering out. 

Footsteps sound behind him. He doesn’t have to turn to recognize the gait of low-heeled boots and easy confidence.

“Busted,” Dani says flatly as she steps up to the glass, standing shoulder to shoulder with him.

“How’d you _ ever _figure out where to find me,” JT retorts with only a mild dose of his usual dry humor. 

“Oh, call it a hunch,” she gives as good as she gets, dripping sarcasm. “Maybe I should become a detective or something.”

She extends a cup towards him, and he knows it’s shitty hospital coffee but after even one day without any source of caffeine whatsoever, he’d take it in an IV drip. He nods his thanks.

“Doc said I’m not supposed to be drinking this,” he remarks as he takes a taste. It’s both exactly as terrible as he imagined, and the most delicious thing he’s had all day. 

She glares at him, extending her hand to take it back. JT elbows her away, moving the cup safely out of reach. 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she grumbles. “Speaking of shit you’re not supposed to be doing. If Gil catches you here he’s gonna have another major cardiac event. Y’know… besides the one he had watching a building fall on his kids.”

JT feels the corner of his lips twitch at that. He sips his coffee and doesn’t look at her. 

Knowing she won’t get an answer, she goes on. “Never seen him like that.”

That familiar twinge of guilt is back. “Well, I’d love to say that’s part of the job and we gotta suck it up but… ain’t a cop in the world ready for that shit.”

She lets out a long sigh of agreement, heavy with residual stress. “No shit. You think Bright’s shrink is taking on any new clients?”

He chuckles at that, and it pulls at his sore muscles but it feels good. It’s something besides fear and pain and panic, and it reminds him all over again, in the most surreal way possible, of what he just survived. Of what _ they _ survived. Against all odds.

He stares at the silent body on the bed through the glass wall, feeling hollow. It’s hard to believe that less than twenty-four hours ago they were both fighting for their lives in the dark. 

Eventually they’re shooed away by the ICU nurses, citing a strict no-visitors policy during shift change hours, and Dani walks with him as he limps back to the elevators. She splits off to take a phone call, and the cop wanders back towards his room. 

He meets the lieutenant in the hallway, looking bewildered to find JT’s room empty.

“You’re up,” Gil smiles widely when he sees him, sounding surprised.

“Busted my ankle, not my spine,” JT grumbles. He accepts Gil’s open-armed hug with a relief he didn’t expect to feel. 

Gil isn’t as reserved about physical contact as Dani. He almost lifts the other detective off the floor with the force, and JT is for the moment, all too happy to reciprocate. His body hurts, but he doesn’t let that stop him. 

It’s easy to see how Malcolm grew so attached to the lieutenant over the years. How Gil was able to slot with seamless ease into his life, a steadfast force of grace and affection and strength and all the things neither of them ever had. 

Gil pulls back far enough to briefly squeeze the Detective’s shoulders with both hands, his eyes crinkling with restrained joy, relief, optimism. JT understands. For all the hell he and Malcolm went through, he knows it was just as difficult for those stranded above ground. Waiting and praying. Helpless. 

“Come on,” Gil nods back to the empty room, “let’s get you back in there before the nurses call a code on you.”

“Just let me sign out AMA and stop wasting everybody’s time,” JT gripes, but obeys. He wanders back into the dimly-lit space, grimacing at the clinical environment. It’s not as bad as the ICU, but it’s wired into him to hate hospitals either way.

“I grabbed your gym bag from the precinct,” Gil gestures to the item in question, sitting on the low table by the wall. “Thought you might want a change of clothes.”

It’s carefully casual, and JT doesn’t miss that as he mutters his thanks and drops to a seat on the thin mattress. He props his crutches up within arm’s reach, watches Gil pull up a chair.

“Sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up; it’s been a bit of a circus.”

“Yeah I’ll bet,” JT snorts. “Don’t worry about it. I ain’t exactly dying over here, anyways.” It’s probably a poor choice of words and he realizes that even as he says it.

Gil grimaces a bit, but dips his head in agreement. “Still… I should have been here.”

Silence hangs between them. All JT can think about is how close it was this time. That Gil might have just as easily spent today making line-of-duty death notifications to his mom and sister. 

“D’you go downstairs?”

“Yeah.” There’s no point in lying, even if he can’t figure out how to explain the compulsion that drove him. “I uh—you know. I had to make sure.”

“After all you boys went through, I can’t say I blame you,” Gil’s eyes are smiling when he turns them on JT. “You know, I hand-picked you for Major Crimes.”

JT groans, sliding his newly-encumbered right leg out until it’s straight in front of him. “Yeah, you’ve mentioned, a few hundred times. And you only say it after I majorly fuck something up.”

“Or,” Gil tips his head thoughtfully, a spark of humor playing in his eyes, “sometimes it’s the opposite. I’ve taken enough flack for your fuck-ups, maybe I wanna take some points for the wins, too.”

“So this is a win, huh? Always wondered what one of those looked like.”

“I’m calling it a win. So, thank you,” the lieutenant says with a strange sincerity, and it’s two words but it sounds like a hundred. He’s looking at JT like the other cop just saved his life. 

JT shakes his head in silent confusion. 

Gil leans back in his chair, rubs at his eyes hard. It’s the first outward sign he’s given that he’s exhausted, overtaxed and overstressed. 

“I’m glad you were down there with him,” he says at last, quieter this time. “I know that sounds terrible, but honestly. You uh, you kept him alive.”

This should be uncomfortable, JT thinks, but it’s Gil. Gil who doesn’t mince words or spit empty bullshit for the sake of making noise. Even if the cop’s never been able to say it directly, the lieutenant has quickly become one of the few men to ever earn his full respect. 

“I’m glad I was there too,” JT surprises himself by saying. He doesn’t elaborate, but he thinks Gil understands him.

He’s right. The other man laughs quietly at that, nodding his head. 

“After I lost Jackie, you know, there was kind of a hole there. Tried filling it with work, with alcohol sometimes, but it was the team. You and Dani, mostly, that really did it. And Malcolm… Damn, that kid. I think Jackie would have adopted him in a heartbeat if she ever got the chance.” 

Gil goes oddly quiet, a futile attempt to keep from getting emotional. His voice is thick and choked, eyes averted. “When the building came down—I swear, all I could think about was—Christ, _ I can’t lose him too_.” 

JT’s heart is in his throat. He wishes he knew what to say. Wonders if anything would sound right.

“He’s gonna make it, right?” The cop asks eventually, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Yeah, he is,” Gil nods as he scrubs a hand over his face, “kid’s a fighter.”

The cop’s sigh of sharp relief is a little too loud, and he doesn’t want Gil to read too much into it, but neither of them can exactly claim to be in full control of their emotions in the moment. 

“Good, that’s good... Guess he’s kinda been growing on me a bit,” he says as casually as he can manage, staring down at the too-white bandages on his palms. “ Y’know, it would suck to break in a new consultant at this point, so... We might as well keep him around.”

The answering laugh is warm and real. 

“He really looks up to you, you know.”

JT glances up in surprise, and he’s not sure what he’s supposed to say to that. It’s a foreign concept, one he can’t wrap his head around.

“Me?” He repeats incredulously. “Correct me if I ain’t remembering this correctly, but we didn’t exactly get off on the right foot from the jump.”

“Neither did you and Dani. Neither did Jackie and I. I brought the wrong bottle of wine to dinner one night, when we first started dating. She kicked me out, told me if I tried to call her again she was taking out a restraining order.”

That draws a snort out of JT. It’s a side to Gil’s fondly-remembered relationship with his late wife he hasn’t heard before. 

“Just trust me on this one,” the lieutenant says fondly. “I’m rarely wrong about this kind of thing.”

The intercom overhead in the hall outside crackles to life, interrupting them.

“Code blue,” the mechanical voice blares, “code blue. ICU, room 18. Code blue, ICU 18.”

Gil and JT look at each other, the ease of their shared company completely forgotten. 

“What’s a code blue,” JT asks, dreading the answer.

“No idea,” Gil is out of his chair a second later, grabbing his abandoned cellphone off the table, “but that’s Malcolm’s room.” 

**.**

“He shouldn’t be awake,” a nurse is yelling across the mattress as JT enters the glass-walled whirlwind of movement and noise. The lights are on, curtains pushed back. There’s a swarm of medical staff around Malcolm’s bed, various machines shrieking out alarms overhead. 

Gil didn’t have the restraint to wait for JT to catch up, so the lieutenant beats him downstairs by a few minutes. It’s been less than a day and the cop is already thoroughly sick of the crutches. His tightly-constricted right leg is throbbing as he forces his body to move a little faster than is comfortable, driven by the kind of controlled panic that’s starting to feel all too familiar. 

“What’s happening,” JT catches at sleeve of the nearest nurse as she breezes past, and he tries to put on his best authoritative voice but it comes out pleading. “What’s wrong with him?”

The brunette nurse looks irritated at the interruption, but she must have recognized him from his earlier visit because her eyes quickly soften as she glares at him. She hesitates a moment, her arms full of medical supplies. 

“I don’t know,” she confesses, looking back at the franticly struggling body on the bed, “but somehow he just came up from a medically induced coma. There’s no way he should have been able to—”

The monitor above the bed _ screams_, cutting off anything else she might have had to say. When JT recovers from the shock of the sudden noise, she’s already scurried away to hand off items to the doctor. 

“Hey hey hey,” Gil soothes as he shoulders between two nurses to grab Bright’s flailing arm. “I’m right here, okay? You’re safe, Malcolm, I need you to calm down—”

There’s a terrible rasping noise coming from the thrashing body on the bed, a sound almost completely smothered by the piercing wail of the biomonitor. 

“We need to extubate,” the attending doctor barks at the staff, most of whom are struggling to hold Bright down as he panics and bucks against their hands. “If we can’t get him back under he’s gonna aspirate.”

Confused and sliding quickly back into panic mode, JT half-steps forward, desperate to do something. Even knowing there’s next to nothing he _ can _ do.

Between reaching arms and gloved hands and colored scrubs, he catches a glimpse of glazed blue eyes, casting around at the unfamiliar faces above him. Confusion. Terror. Malcolm’s somehow fully conscious, his body rejecting the foreign presence jammed down his throat, invasive and suffocating. 

“How the hell is he awake,” one of the male nurses swears aloud as Malcolm narrowly misses kicking him in the gut. 

JT feels his chest constrict as he watches, hardly able to track what’s happening. Gil is trying to hold Malcolm’s shoulders down, muttering a stream of nonsense as he leans in close to the kid’s ear. It doesn’t seem to be working.   
  


Those marble blue eyes are rolling aimlessly around the room, like a wild animal backed into a corner, knowing only that he has to flee or fight for his life. 

It’s too painful to watch. Too painful to stand there and do nothing, helpless all over again. That’s all he seems to be these days. 

The simple concept sparks something dark in him all over again. Without thinking JT steps forward, grabbing Malcolm’s right hand where it’s shaking and twisted into the thin white sheets. Out of the dozen or so people currently touching him, gripping every limb and trying to wrestle him down as he panics, somehow Malcolm feels _ that. _

Terrified blue eyes land on him. JT freezes in place. 

There’s a flicker of recognition that bubbles up there, a glimpse of lucid reasoning. Something in the kid seems to snap, deflate, and he slumps back into the bed. He’s still staring at JT, his chest heaving as sweat drips down his skin. 

The cop doesn’t break eye contact, gripping the hand in his own as hard as he can without hurting him any more. Bright’s latched onto him with his eyes like he’s the only real thing in the room, and something in his brain won’t let go of that. It feels like they both needed it. Reality in the nightmare, the aftermath of a war they survived together. 

At his shoulder, he feels Gil turn to stare at him in wonder, as floored by Malcolm’s reaction as the rest of the nurses are. They take advantage of the sudden lull, working to silence the screaming machines. 

JT doesn’t say anything, just holds Bright’s pained eyes with a nod and a promise. 

He forces himself not to look away as the doctor extubates Bright, as the kid heaves his bloody guts up into a waiting bedpan when the foreign intrusion is painfully removed. An experience that was never meant to be endured by a conscious patient. 

It’s only at this point that JT lets go of the frail one he’s been almost crushing in his own, stepping away from the bed to let the doctors work.

“You guys must’a really done some soul-searching down there,” Gil finally says, and there’s an awed wonder in his voice but it’s shaky too. “That was….” He trails off oddly, and JT doesn’t offer to help him fill in the blanks. 

“You should stay,” the doctor tells JT tiredly on the way out, stripping off his gloves. “If he’s gonna burn through sedatives like that, we’re probably in for a long ride here.”

Gil makes a “_see?” _face at him that’s hard to miss. 

JT just nods, feeling drained all over again. Physically, he’s fading out, the rolling waves of peace and panic taking their toll on him. His brain is still stuck on high alert, telling him he has a job to do even if he couldn’t possibly explain what it is. 

It’s a dichotomy of conflicting feelings, pitting the baser parts of his psyche against sheer logic and coming up short. At the very least, it’s a relief to know he won’t have to fight the staff on hanging around. 

He’s not sure if an entire army could have dragged him away now. 

JT spends the first part of the night slumped in an armchair, eventually moves to a collapsible cot just inside the glass partition. Close enough that Malcolm can see him if he wakes up. Still leaving enough room for the nurses to wheel their equipment in and out with ease. 

The medical staff doesn’t sleep, in and out every hour or so. Sometimes they’re loud enough to wake him up, sometimes they’re not. He only knows that he comes to a handful of times in the night. Catches glowing eyes turned and watching him through half-mast lids. The kid’s way too gone to say anything, his body still tirelessly fighting the massive doses of sedatives pumping through his veins, but JT thinks he understands anyways. 

It’s somewhere around four in the morning when he rolls onto his side, catches a sliver of blue staring at him in the half-light. Earnest and raw. Like maybe Malcolm thinks he’s a ghost who will fade out of reality if he dares to look away for even a moment. The profiler looks exhausted.

“We made it out, kid,” JT mumbles at him half-awake, knowing only that he’s been fighting the same heavy dread all day, the same post-trauma terror that seems to clog in your lungs when you least expect it. “We’re gonna be okay, y’hear me...”

Malcolm makes a soft sound like a labored breath, and his eyes flutter closed again. 

JT sleeps too, and this time he doesn’t wake again until morning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I need to give a special shout to @theyhulk for being the world's greatest hype-person! 
> 
> Also all props to @eringeosphere for catching every single one of my many typos and hiccups; it's thanks to her that you have a much more coherent and readable chapter coming to you tonight. 
> 
> If you want to get in on the brainstorming, come join the #Brimel discord server! We're growing fast <3
> 
> https://discord.gg/K6tqRws


	8. Chapter Eight

There’s something that happens between soldiers. 

It’s a gut-deep instinct to latch on to whoever happens to be standing next to you, suffering with you. 

Finding reasons to live in gambling cigarettes and packs of gum by lantern light, the cards gritty with dust as tent flaps snap in the night wind. Making up crude songs to old tunes; finding heated debates in every topic that comes up for the simple sake of keeping their minds occupied. 

Maybe they wouldn’t have been friends back home. Maybe they would have run with different crowds in high school, drank at different bars in college. Strangers from every corner of the country. 

Paths that never would have crossed become the same path, now.

And there’s an  _ us against them  _ attitude that settles in their bones so deep that they’ll never really shake it because they don’t see it happening. Not until they get home, and spend the next few years feeling jumpy and wrong-footed and so far off-balance that a stiff breeze could tip them over. 

_ They’ll never know what we went through, _ they tell each other in not so many words.  _ They’ll never be one of us. And we’ll never be one of them.  _

Just like that they’ve put themselves on the wrong side of the glass. Broken off into something  _ other _ . 

Coming back to the place they used to live feels like stepping onto another planet. They play along, faking normalcy and relearning basic interactions with people they no longer understand. 

They think they’ll never find that again. That shared bond of doing great and terrible things, living through impossible horrors. It breaks them. Some of them start drinking. Others turn to needles, to spoons and scorch marks. 

Against the odds, some of them soldier on, determined to treat the civilian world as another war they can fight through. 

JT remembers his First Sergeant dropping a hand onto his shoulder. 

On a massive transport on the way back to the states, bound for a landing at Washington Dulles to split off onto commercial liners headed for their old homes. Most of them have finished their tours and are taking a few weeks of leave before reporting to their next duty station. 

Others, like JT, have medical discharge paperwork folded under their vest and a meaningless bit of metal and ribbon tucked into a cardboard box in their duffel. 

“You’re not going to drink,” McAllister tells him with serious brown eyes. “You’re going to go to PT. Hit the gym, spend time with your family. You’re going to call that number I gave you and find a job, you hear me?”

JT’s eyes burn, long dry and red-rimmed with exhaustion. Fresh out of a field hospital and only walking with the aid of Oxy and a crutch. He’s just lost everything that meant anything to him, and the wounds are too fresh. The mental more than the physical.

“Yes sir,” he hears himself respond. Like a machine. Like a soldier.

“Good man.” McAllister slaps him on the back of the neck, grins proudly. Using his own shoulders to hold up the optimism and resolve that JT has lost sight of. Carrying the weight for him.

JT keeps his promise. Stays dry. Works his ass off getting his mobility back and applies for the Police Academy as soon as he can pass the physical.

His First Sergeant calls him every night, asks him the same questions. 

“Have you been drinking?”  _ No sir. _

“How’s PT?”  _ Crushing it. I’m going to be on my own two feet by Mikey’s funeral, mark my words. _

He sees McAllister again at the funeral. Sees Mikey’s mom. Thinks he was supposed to meet her someday but not like this.

“You knew my son? Did you serve together?”

_ Yes _ , he lies. It’s not the time to tell her that JT didn’t know him. He loved him. 

It will never be the time, and so he stands there in his hunter green dress uniform with a black beret pulled down over his eyes. Sets his jaw and salutes as twenty-one shots fire overhead and she’s presented with a folded flag.

He listens to the bagpipes play and thinks about anything else. There’s a silver pendant of Saint Michael hanging heavy under his shirt, against his skin. They took it off Mikey’s body and handed it to him in the field hospital, and JT knows he should give it to the soldier’s mother but he  _ can’t _ . 

It’s all he has left. 

After the smoke clears he drives himself home. Sits on his bed and puts a gun in his mouth. 

McAllister calls him, and that number flashing across his abandoned cell looks like a hand held out in the dark. 

McAllister lets him cry on the phone, deep sobs that shake his shoulders and rip through his chest like mortar fire. When he calms down enough to speak, JT tells him he was accepted into the academy. That he starts in December.

“That’s your reason,” McAllister tells him. “That’s your war now.”

Three weeks later the calls stop. 

JT knows. He knows before he ever gets the phone call.

It happened in Khanashin, on a push into the Helmand River Valley. McAllister died on the spot. It was quick. They’re shipping his body back to Fort Benning next week.

It’s the first funeral JT misses, but not the last.

He thinks about Mikey all the time. Thinks about McAllister and the way his phone doesn’t ring anymore. Thinks that he would be ashamed of who JT has become under the pain and pressure. Relives short stolen moments when he wakes up before dawn, looping them in his brain.

He thinks maybe what he’s been through will make him a better person. Softer, more understanding. Instill him with the well-rounded peace of a man with perspective. 

It doesn’t.

Instead it turns him cold. He lets bittersweet memories evolve into something ugly, twisting him up until he wakes up one day and realizes they’ve turned into  _ hate. _ Unpredictable surges of apathy and rage. Resenting the smiling people around him for somehow still having everything that he’s lost. 

It’s a miracle he finds a direction for it. Starts boxing again, a pastime he gave up in High School to play football, to join the Army. Works overtime shifts once he’s off probation and starts drinking again. Nothing major, just a few beers after shift. Tumbling around the city at midnight, discovering new watering holes and forming loose, distant friendships with people he never lets too close. It’s stagnant and comfortable. 

He spends almost a decade that way. Turned off. Shut down like a robot, lost without a purpose, powered down and unable to find a reason to come back to life. 

He stops thinking about Mikey. Slices open his boiling veins and lets the only person he ever loved bleed out of him. Fade away. Relegates him to  _ yesterday _ and fuzzy flashbacks that only reappear when he drinks. 

He turns the framed photo that sits on his TV stand face-down and lets it collect dust there. 

Loses himself in a job that sometimes,  _ almost _ scratches that phantom itch. There are days when he feels whole. Content. Satisfied that from his own scorched shell and flaming wreckage, he built something. Did the best he could. Played out a shit hand with a solid poker face and isn’t that the best a man can do? Laugh at the grim reaper when the gig is up, shrug and tell him,  _ oh well, I tried _ .

He stays the course, makes it by. Soldiers on.

Until one day he doesn’t. 

He meets Bright. Greets him with all the bitterness and scathing resentment he’s spent ten years shoring up around himself like sandbags in Kabul. He dislikes the kid immediately, and Dani is the first to point out that he dislikes  _ everyone _ immediately. 

This is different. Bright is ten thousand volts of  _ chaos _ straight to the chest. He disturbs everything. Crashes into order and structure like a freight train. He doesn’t make sense and doesn’t follow rules and he doesn’t hide his battle scars like a sane man is supposed to. 

JT thinks he hates him.

Until one day he doesn’t.

  
  


**.**

  
  


JT spends another two days in the hospital, taking his title shot for Worst Patient of the Year. His attending physician almost loses his mind when he finds out the cop is spending his nights in the ICU instead of his own room. It’s short-lived. 

Malcolm has another panic attack when the cop tries to placate the nurses by staying upstairs; the two doctors quickly come to an agreement. JT takes up residence on the cot by the glass door, promises to stay out of the way. Watches Malcolm’s primary doctor and a confused pulmonologist experiment with a cocktail of sedatives designed to keep Bright unconscious and healing. 

He watches them inject too-large syringes into too many tubes and listens to it  _ drip. _ He hates every second of it. 

JT’s own physician, still irritated by the unconventional situation but forced to play along, tells JT he should consider spending the remainder of the week in the hospital. Reminds him of the various complications that could arise from his injuries and cites the word “protocol” about a dozen times. 

The cop doesn’t much give a shit about protocols, and signs himself out the next morning. Moves his single meager gym bag downstairs to the foot of his cot in Bright’s room. Finds he can’t sleep much, plagued by dark dreams and mindless terror. He spends most of his time staring into space, sucked into colorless limbo. Time cycles and loops and he quickly loses track of what day it is. 

Malcolm is predictably uncooperative, even sedated. 

He keeps blinking back into awareness, tries talking to anyone he can see. The words never make much sense, come out like he’s drunk, but JT is heartened to see him fighting. Maybe that’s not the right word for it. Malcolm isn’t fighting, he’s  _ clawing _ , screaming, desperate. Like he’d rather kill himself trying to stay awake than chance a single moment trapped in oblivion.

And the cop knows it’s probably the worst thing for the kid’s health, knows that he should be in a coma healing up a partially collapsed lung and a half-dozen broken ribs, but he can’t help but secretly feel a little proud of him. Bright’s a fighter. 

JT makes himself scarce when Jessica is around, but can’t completely avoid bumping into her and Ainsley on occasion. There are awkward introductions, confused looks exchanged between the two women. Jessica is polite enough to thank the cop for his part in returning Malcolm to them, but it rubs him the wrong way somehow. 

He retreats to skulk in the cafeteria, hunching in the corner in his favorite old gym hoodie and nursing the worst double espresso he’s ever tasted. 

The gratitude and guilt and sappy comments are getting under his skin in the worst way, and he knows he’s close to snapping. Thinks Gil and Dani both sense it too, as they start giving him a little more space, falling quickly back into acerbic banter and old routine. Taking off the kid gloves.

The ugly truth of it all is that nobody should be thanking him. He didn’t  _ do _ anything. It feels like they’re rubbing his face in it, even if nobody can possibly know how helpless he really was, how long it took him to be anything besides useless. 

How even then, all he could do was sit in the dark and pray that somebody found them. 

Thinking about it makes his teeth hurt.

He’s not sleeping well. Getting lost in vivid memories that taste like old nightmares. And it’s a heavy kind of darkness he hasn’t felt in years, dropping back onto his shoulders like a rucksack layered in molle and desert dust. Wrapping around his ribcage and turning him inside out. 

He’s not himself and he knows it. Doesn’t know how anybody possibly could be under the circumstances. The guilt is eating him alive and he can feel it happening, feel the downhill slide. It’s terrifying to realize that he can’t do a goddamn thing to catch himself. 

The cop is seized with the illogical, almost overwhelming urge to  _ hit something.  _ To hurt someone or hurt himself and he can’t for the life of him figure out which one he wants more. 

He drains his cup of bitter, gritty coffee and crumples the flimsy cardboard between his hands. Crushes it until it makes his skin ache with the force and tries to breathe. 

Gil tracks him down in the cafeteria. Slides admin leave paperwork across the table and a pen for him to sign it. Looks like he’s expecting a fight.

The cop lifts up the top page, sees an identical form underneath with Malcolm’s name on it. Sees that Gil has scribbled “unable to sign” on the bottom. It makes him squeamish and he doesn’t know why.

JT presses hard, signs a black ink “X” on the signature line and hands it back without a word. 

**.**

“Jackson.” 

JT looks up tiredly, blinking at Malcolm. He’s sitting in an uncomfortable chair by the kid’s bed, his elbows on his knees. He’s been completely checked out, staring unseeingly at the spotless tile floor. It’s somewhere in the early hours of the morning and it says a lot about how fucked up his sleep schedule has become that he’s awake. 

“Jared... Jamal…?”

“Why you gotta go straight to the hood names, huh?”

It’s been a week. JT’s ankle is nearly healed; the crutches and plastic boot have been replaced by a black velcro brace he can hide under his jeans. 

“I’m gonna figure it out someday,” the profiler rasps, tugging his oxygen tube away from his nose with clumsy hands. 

“Stop it,” JT scolds him mildly, “you’re gonna give your doc an aneurysm.”

“Pretty sure I can breathe without it,” Bright tries for a weak grin.

“Yeah, cause they blew your lung back up, dumbass.”

JT watches Malcolm blink at the ceiling, his eyes darting back and forth with all the energy his body hasn’t quite regained yet. 

“You okay?” 

“Yes,” JT says firmly, straightening up in his chair and listening to his spine crack and pop. “Stop asking me that. You’re the one in a hospital bed, in case you missed it.”

Bright lolls his head towards him, his forehead bunched together and creasing with confusion. 

“I don’t remember.”

“Good,” the cop sighs. “Probably better that way.”

JT thinks of watching a bloody stretcher wheel away into the cold night and hopes Malcolm never remembers any of it. Wishes the universe could somehow grant him the same mercy. 

He’s been thinking of what he wants to say for days, but now that Bright’s actually awake he can’t remember a word. He’s distracted by the sensation of oxygen filling up his lungs, like he’s breathing deep and full for the first time since they were pulled out of the rubble. 

“Your sis is in the waiting room,” he says instead. “Been switching off with your mom.”

Malcolm grins, and he looks tired and pale but alert, tracking in a way he wasn’t before.

“You’re here.” It’s a statement and a question. Bright’s irises look like blue coals in a fireplace, shining out of the heavy purple shadows that hang under his eyes. His pupils are blown wide, the only clue that he’s still doped up with enough drugs to take down an elephant. 

JT thinks he should have expected that little sliver of insight, but he finds he doesn’t really know how to answer. Not in a way that sounds  _ normal, _ rational. 

He can’t exactly tell him that during his brief forays into consciousness, Malcolm panicked in his absence. Can’t point out that his own smothering guilt and horrific dreams have driven him to watchful insomnia, to standing sentinel by a hospital bed for his own sanity as much as for Bright’s.

“Someone had to keep you from ripping out your IV and taking off running down the halls,” he huffs at last, thinking it’s a happy medium. 

“I’d like to see you try,” Malcolm chuckles, hides a cough. All false bravado and dopey smiles. 

JT abandons his post, finds Ainsley and Jessica both in the ICU waiting room down the hall. Tells them Malcolm woke up and watches them go take his place in a sterile white room that smells like death and antiseptic. 

He limps back to the cafeteria, buys himself a coffee. Wonders when he’ll stop feeling empty.

**.**

It’s three days before Bright tries getting out of bed. Another two after that before his doctors reluctantly let him succeed and from there, there doesn’t seem to be a force on earth that can stop him. 

They move the kid to a room on the second floor. 

JT sleeps at his own apartment and spends less time at Elmhurst, feeling inexplicably out of place, like whatever self-imposed responsibility he’d taken upon his shoulders has lifted. He wasn’t ready for it. Wasn’t prepared to be useless again, to be aimless and trapped in his own head without a purpose.

Everything in him hates that he can’t even use work to occupy himself. Not that he’d be much use, he thinks, but having something to keep his mind busy would be a welcome distraction. 

Visiting Bright in the hospital becomes less of a compulsion and more of an easy kind of habit. He’s not even sure if he’s supposed to come back at first, or if Jessica and Gil will slowly slip into his place.

But when he visits in the mornings, usually at some unholy hour after spending the night tossing and turning in his own bed, Bright looks overjoyed to see him. Disappointed to see him go, always parting with a “ _ you’re coming back tomorrow, right” _ that manages to tug at his heartstrings. 

He thinks it’s a Wednesday. Thursday maybe? 

Sleep claims him for an hour or two. He jerks awake in the pitch darkness listening to something  _ drip _ in his brain, drilling into his skull. He follows the sound into his small kitchen and takes a wooden cutting board to the leaking faucet. Bashes at it until he snaps back to his senses and realizes what he’s doing. 

Shaky with residual adrenaline, he crawls under the sink and shuts the water off. 

JT stands in the kitchen in his bare feet, the streetlights glowing through the window on the remains of the battered faucet he just destroyed in a mindless rage. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” he asks himself under his breath, dragging a tired hand across his face. 

He spends the rest of the night on the couch, abandoning his mattress in the hopes that the change of location will help him turn his brain off. Cycles between flipping over his pillow, pulling a blanket over his body, throwing it off. Counts the minutes until the coffee shop opens at 6AM and it’s socially acceptable to be out and about. 

The cop is warming up his jeep by a quarter til, watching his breath kick out puffs of white air in the autumn cold. Wonders how the hell he can feel so tired and still be unable to rest. Thinks of going from a dead sleep to a blind rage in the middle of the night and wonders if he’s losing his mind. 

He makes it to the hospital by 6:30, sparing a tired wave to the nurse at the front desk on his way in. She’s grown used to seeing him by now, and is wise enough not to try to make conversation.

The door to Malcolm’s room is closed, and he raps his knuckles on it twice before letting himself in.

“Mornin’ battle buddy,” he grunts as he drops a paper sack on the counter and sets down the tray of paper mugs from Caffe Bene. 

It’s almost routine by now, but not quite. Floating somewhere between thinking a little too hard at the counter while he tries to remember his coffee order, and hoping today might be the day he gets Bright to finish off a muffin or a breakfast burrito. Most mornings the kid will take a few bites and wordlessly pass off his leftovers for JT to scarf down. Other days, he won’t even taste the food.

JT’s still mostly asleep and running entirely on the half-cup of dark roast he was able to chug on the drive, so it takes him a beat or two to realize Malcolm is not only out of bed, but fully dressed. Straightening the collar of a three-piece suit in the mirror. 

“Going to a wedding or a funeral?” JT can’t resist jabbing as he sets out cups and tosses the tray in the trash.

“Please, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing this to a funeral.” Malcolm sounds oddly chipper, throws a grin over his shoulder. “Pun fully intended.”

“Well I know you ain’t planning to sit in bed all day wearing  _ that _ .” JT won’t let him dodge the question. 

“Of course not. I’m checking out.”

JT pauses halfway through unwrapping a sausage and egg burrito. “Uh. Today?”

“Today. I’m supposed to come back in a week to have my stitches out, but in the meantime, I’m the picture of perfect health.” 

The cop gets the distinct impression that the conversation was probably a little more confrontational than that, but figures if an entire hospital full of surgeons and nurses can’t keep Bright confined to a bed, he sure as hell won’t be able to either. 

“Perfect health,” JT echoes, “right. I’m sure those were his exact words.”

Still white as a sheet, the ghosts of ugly bruises fading into his hairline in shades of green and purple, Malcolm ambles over for his coffee. The kid is still a less than graceful on his feet, but he’s shaved and combed his hair back. It’s clear he’s doing his best impression of healthy and whole, is likely fully aware he’s not quite pulling it off. 

“Your mom picking you up, then?” JT leans his hip against the table and sips at his coffee, irritated that it’s still on the scalding side of hot.

“I may or may not have neglected to tell her,” Bright says somewhat reluctantly, raising his eyebrows as he pops the lid off his coffee cup and starts dumping in sugar packets.

JT hums in acknowledgement. 

“I know, I know,” Bright sighs. He drinks his coffee like he doesn’t even notice how hot it is. “Thanks, by the way.”

“What about Gil?” JT thinks he’s getting smarter, or maybe he’s just in tune enough by now to recognize Malcolm’s less subtle attempts to subvert the conversation. “Dani?”

Malcolm looks like a kid caught shaking his Christmas presents. “So… Maybe you’re the first to know. Surprise?”

“You’re a grown ass man, I ain’t about to fight you on it,” JT gripes, thinking he’d actually be more than willing to fight the kid if he thought it would do any good. “Tell you what. Finish one of those burritos off and I’ll drop you at your place.”

Bright looks relieved enough to reach into the paper bag. He gingerly takes a seat on the bed and obediently makes an attempt to eat. 

JT scarfs down two before Malcolm’s made it through half of his own. 

“Can I ask you a question?”

The cop looks over at him, a little surprised that he feels the need to ask. 

“Can I stop you?” He only half-jokes. 

“Back there… in the parking garage. You broke your own ankle to get to me.” 

It’s not really a question. Bright sounds a little awed and strangely guilty, and JT isn’t sure he’s comfortable with that. It’s the first time Malcolm’s brought up  _ that night _ directly, a fact the cop wrote off to memory loss or avoidance or both. 

He’s not sure how Malcolm knows. Maybe Gil told him. Maybe Dani, or maybe the profiler weaseled it out of one of the doctors. It doesn’t much matter, the cop thinks. He was bound to find out eventually. 

“Dislocated, technically.”

Bright nods, his eyes moving rapidly as he stares at the wall, like he’s a million miles away. His food hangs in his hands, forgotten.

After a beat, Malcolm fixes that piercing gaze on the detective once more, like whatever answers he’s searching for are escaping him. Drops his gaze to JT’s right ankle, and even though he’s not able to see the brace the cop’s wearing under his boot, he probably hasn’t missed the limp.

“Why?”

JT feels defensive without understanding why, the scrutiny enough to make him squirm. 

“What do you mean, why?” It comes out sharper than he means it to, and maybe the sleepless night has left him a little more on-edge than he realized. “What else was I supposed to do, let you bleed to death?”

Malcolm is silent, averting his eyes. JT stands there, feeling off-balance. 

“It’s not like you wouldn’t a’done the same for me. Hell, probably a lot worse.”

That earns him a quirk of the lips, the ghost of a real smile. Bright goes quiet.

“It doesn’t matter anyways. That’s the nature of the job, y’know, do what’s gotta be done.” JT thinks again of a dark apartment and the sound an axe makes as it crunches through bone and tissue.

“This is making you uncomfortable,” Bright points out unnecessarily. “I apologize. Boundaries, they’re important.” 

Not his words, someone else’s. He’s just repeating them.

“That doesn’t make things less weird, kid.”

“What I should have said, is  _ thank you. _ ” Bright nods into the distance again like he’s staring at one of his cluttered crime boards, connecting little red strings. 

JT pinches the bridge of his nose. Wonders how it would go over if he just turned on his heel and walked out of the room. 

It’s the surest sign that Malcolm is on the road to recovery; he’s already elbow deep in everyone else’s brains. Maybe he’s ready to check out after all. 

“Nobody’s ever done something like that for me,” Bright remarks eventually. 

The cop looks at him, wondering how he does that. Swings between hot and cold like a damn pendulum, dancing on the edge of JT’s last good nerve. Suckerpunching him with a statement so innocent and raw that a second later, he’s already forgotten his irritation.

“Well I sure as hell hope not,” he manages to reply quietly. “Let’s not make a habit of it.”

Silence hangs thick in the air between them. It doesn’t feel like either of them are really present, really prepared for too-deep conversations about terror and blood in the dark. 

They’re at a stalemate, JT thinks. Because maybe they  _ don’t _ know how to talk about it yet, but they don’t know how to move on either. How to recover and compartmentalize and put it all behind them like a bad dream. 

He has a blind moment of emboldened imagination. Thinks that if he were a braver man, he might open his mouth and let it all spill out of his throat. The bad dreams, the bone-deep paranoia that feels too much like adrenaline sometimes, the waves of irrational rage. That unsettling sense of  _ wrongness _ that seems to hang over the world like a shroud. Clawing and tripping and sucking him down. Quicksand in his brain. 

If he were a braver man he wouldn’t feel so ashamed at the idea of airing these things out.

Things changed between them in a few shadowed hours. They cracked open to each other, unfolding in the fire. What’s a few simple words between men who have nearly died together?   
  


But he doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t offer comfort or mercy or reasoning for why he did what he did. 

It’s strange to realize that after everything he’s already told the kid about himself, this is where his stubborn, foolish heart decides to draw the line. 

“Come on,” he sighs to break the silence, fishing out his keys. “Grab your stuff before I change my mind.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And voila! The next installment. I have never been so faithful to a posting schedule in my entire life. 
> 
> Thanks again to @eringeosphere for the beta, and to her and all the other amazing cheerleaders and brainstormers over on the #Brimel discord server. ( https://discord.gg/K6tqRws )
> 
> Thanks to them I've been constantly motivated and have embarked on a writing rampage this week, churning out two chapters and a 20 page long bonus fluff fic which will be coming to you all for Christmas. (So keep an eye out, hint hint)
> 
> Thank you again to everyone who took the time to read and comment, you mean the world to me.


	9. Chapter Nine

JT wasn’t built for inaction. 

He’s harshly reminded of this after a full day-and-a-half spent at home, limping around in basketball shorts and a t-shirt, trying in vain to find a way to distract himself. 

The cop tries watching TV, tries organizing his cluttered desk. Works out for a few minutes at a time with the dumbells sitting by the couch. Buys a new faucet and replaces the remains of twisted metal over the kitchen sink. When he starts to get desperate he even turns to housework. Dusts some surfaces that have gone too long undisturbed, sweeps and vacuums and rearranges stacks of mail and magazines. 

It doesn’t take long. His apartment is a mostly-plain haven of caffeine and practicality. A quiet place to rest his head between work today and work tomorrow, and after spending the morning dragging himself listlessly around the small space that becomes all too apparent. 

It doesn’t really feel like _ home _ , he realizes, and he’s not even sure why. Nowhere’s really felt right to him in years. 

He doesn’t like the dark turn his own thoughts are starting to take, so a little after noon he gets himself dressed. Hides his ankle brace under a pair of jeans and a hoodie and drives himself to the precinct. 

He spends the better part of thirty minutes begging Gil to let him help out, off the clock. To give him literally anything to do. He offers to process evidence, cross-check personnel files or enter witnesses into the report system. Makes it clear he’s not too proud for busy work. 

Arroyo is predictably pissed at JT for showing up at all.  _ You’re as bad as Malcolm, Jesus Christ.  _ The lieutenant kicks him out without mercy, telling him to find a hobby and enjoy his paid vacation. 

The cop drags his feet on the way out, hoping he can catch Dani and enlist her help changing Gil’s mind. She’s nowhere to be found. He catches a glimpse of the bank of screens over the on-call desk, displaying colorless live feeds from the holding rooms. The sight stops him in his tracks.

One of the half-dozen interview rooms is pulled up on a flat screen, the camera fixed on a metal table with a chair on either side. A single occupant is wearing orange, seated and handcuffed to the rail on top of the table. There’s a circular tattoo on the back of his hand and it seems to glow in the colorless light. 

_ Grezny. _

JT feels cold. Stares at the gaunt face and scraggly beard. 

He thinks of standing on a concrete landing, looking across an empty street at that same shadowed face. Watching him hold up an old cellphone to bring the world crashing down around his ears. 

JT jerks around when he hears a noise, sees Gil glaring at him through the window of his office. The lieutenant points meaningfully at him and mouths something that looks like  _ get the fuck out of my precinct, _ but then again, JT’s not a lip reader.

He spares a last glance up at the screen, watches the door to the interview room swing open as Dani enters with a stack of files. 

The cop walks to the elevators feeling sick to his stomach. Makes it out to the employee parking lot, moving like he’s on autopilot. 

JT sits in his car and stares at the building across the street, not really processing what he’s looking at. His mind drifts, troubled and disjointed. He’s spent the morning restless and swimming in his own uneasiness, and somehow he just made it worse. More accurately, catching sight of Grezny’s slack, emotionless features made it worse. It feels like a kick in the gut and there’s nothing he can do. 

He hates feeling so out of stride, and he can’t figure out how to fix it. 

For a long, incredibly tempting moment, he thinks about driving to Billymark’s. Finding an empty barstool and spending the rest of the night on it. Wonders if there’s any force on earth that would be able to stop him if he started drinking today. All things considered, it’s a terrible idea.

His phone chimes. It yanks him out of his head, out of all the self-destructive tempting ways he could waste his day. JT pulls it out of his pocket, grateful for the distraction.

There’s a text from Bright. 

_ How’s leave treating you? Are you drunk yet? _

It’s strangely conversational, signalling that Malcolm’s going just as stir-crazy as he is.

JT’s thumb hovers over the keyboard while he tries to figure out what to say back. Wonders if he should reply at all, or just pretend he didn’t read the message and go get drunk. Before he can make up his mind, another text pops up.

_ Gil already called me. He says if he catches me lurking around the station he’s going to fire me. _

JT snorts out a laugh. 

_ You at home? _

He hits “send” and drums his fingers on the steering wheel. Wonders why he asked.

Malcolm’s response is almost instantaneous. 

_ Bring coffee. _

**.**

JT brings coffee. He forgoes food this time, partially because the menu at Bene’s is different during afternoon hours and he doesn’t know how to process that, but primarily because he knows by now that Bright won’t eat it. 

After seeing Grezny’s face, the cop finds he’s lost his appetite anyway.

Secretly he’s grateful for Malcolm’s unspoken invitation. He hadn’t been sure how to go about checking in on the kid without looking paranoid or smothering or worse. It’s strange to him that he even worries about things like that now, because he’s never been an overthinker and isn’t sure when it started. 

He only knows that whatever strange connection now exists between them, starting as an uneasy pseudo-friendship and blooming under shared circumstances, has become something strangely comforting. He doesn’t want to linger on that thought for too long, doesn’t want to think about what it means. Knows that if he did, he might not like what the answers he comes up with.

The apartment looks vastly different by daylight. It looks different sober.

Bright’s wearing a white t-shirt and sweatpants, and it’s oddly reminiscent of the first time JT was here. 

“My hero,” Malcolm breathes as he gratefully accepts the familiar paper cup the cop passes to him over the countertop.

JT eyes Malcolm’s battered knuckles, still red and angry under the lights.

“You takin’ your meds?” He asks suspiciously, noticing the row of orange pill bottles on the marble, the kid’s coiled and restless energy.

“All I do is take meds,” comes the resigned response. “How’s your ankle?”

Wondering why Malcolm seems so preoccupied by JT’s comparatively minor injury, the cop shakes his head at him. “It’s fine,  _ sheesh _ . How’s the hole in your ribs?”

Taking the hint, Bright grins. “Never better.”

JT thinks the kid is full of shit, but he does look better than he did at the hospital. Not like that’s saying much. 

“Look at us.” Malcolm is buzzing around his kitchen, pulling various items out of the fridge and cupboards as he starts dressing his coffee with all the reckless approximation of a mad scientist. “We’re trauma bonding.”

JT stares at him, feels his eyebrows shoot up. “I’m about to go trauma bond with a jack and coke.”

“Sorry.” Malcolm doesn't sound sorry in the slightest. “I think I’m trying to ease our transition into pseudo-civilian normalcy…” He pauses to take a sip of his drink, which by now is mostly sugar, glancing at the cop over the lid. “Is it working?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Did I ever show you my collection?” Bright doesn’t even hear him, his brain already rushing on to the next topic. Faster than the cop can blink, the kid abandons his coffee on the counter and darts across the room. 

JT humors him, follows him to the floor-to-ceiling shelves and glass cases. 

He wonders briefly if Malcolm is on something, or if the inactivity and cabin fever is just getting to him the same way it’s been getting to JT. The profiler is all energy, bouncing off the walls. Like all that time spent immobile in the hospital he was just storing energy like a battery, and now he needs to find a way to expend it or explode. 

It’s making the cop’s head spin.

For now he’s willing to play along, keep an eye on Bright from a distance, let him ramble if that’s what he needs to do. Like being back at the hospital, it relaxes something in his bones just to be here. Sharing the same space, having a visual reminder that the kid’s  _ fine _ , alive and breathing. It gives his worked-up brain permission to unwind. 

While a little unsettling, the massive weapons display is admittedly impressive. 

He’s becoming keenly aware of how little he really knew about the kid before the last few weeks. Didn’t even care to. Hell, the cop hadn’t even known if Bright was single or not before his first visit to his apartment. He’d always compartmentalized, sorted him away into little boxes and categories. 

He’s a little ashamed of himself for his own short-sightedness, but after learning that Malcolm’s father was a famed serial killer, it seemed like all he needed to know. He’d put a lid on it, determined to focus on the only facet of the Rubik’s cube that seemed relevant. And JT’s not the kind of man who enjoys changing his mind, changing his perspective, but he doesn’t feel like he’s had much of a choice in this case. 

“Ye Do?” JT guesses as he gestures to an ornamental short sword hanging in one of the cases. He’s sure he’s butchering the pronunciation.

The surprised smile Malcolm turns on him is blinding. It’s clear he’s impressed. “You recognize it.”

“I was stationed in Korea for a year or two,” the cop grumbles in his own defense. “Wasn’t much to do around there.”

“Also called  _ Dan Do _ ,” Bright rattles on, pulling the glass doors of the case open and picking up the item in question. “Hand-to-hand weapons from early Korean dynasties are hard to come by. Most of their tools from the 16th century were spears or lances, designed for mounted combat.” 

JT takes a cautious step back as Malcolm unsheathes the weapon, swinging it experimentally through the air. He’s oddly graceful with the blade, but it doesn’t make the cop any less nervous.

“This one was probably used for training standing armies, foot soldiers—” Malcolm finally seems to notice the cop’s retreat, looks a little embarrassed. “Which I’m sure is not all that interesting,” he corrects himself with a self-deprecating laugh.

“I ain’t saying that,” the cop huffs, “but I  _ am _ sayin’ I have a few bad memories of you swingin’ sharp objects around.”

“Touche,” Bright concedes. 

He carefully sheathes the sword and replaces it in the hanging case, shutting the glass over it. He recovers quickly, starts narrating the other items in his collection. The kid’s half-historian and half crime hobbyist, full of just as much irrelevant knowledge about the origins of each piece as he is about the various ways they could damage a human body. 

“I tried to get Dani to throw axes with me when she was here,” Bright mentions eventually, bringing JT’s wandering mind snapping back to the present. “Oddly enough she didn’t exactly seem thrilled by the prospect. Of course, I  _ was  _ high at the time.”

“Dani was here?” JT repeats, not sure why that detail is sticking out to him. 

Malcolm shrugs, his eyes still traveling with fond affection over his strange collection. “Yeah, Gil made her babysit me. Y’know, that one time when I inhaled cocaine. Accidentally.”

The cop grimaces at the memory.

“I always thought maybe the two of you…” JT trails off, realizes he’s probably overstepping by a mile by even asking. He’s not sure why he cares, why the idea bothers him.

Malcolm turns blue eyes on him, blinks for a moment. JT can almost see the unvoiced implication hitting him, watches it come over his face. Thinks the kid could stand to learn to play poker.

“Oh. Oh, no,” Malcolm flounders. “That’s not—there’s nothing between us, trust me. I think we’re almost friends, actually.” 

“Hey it’s none of my business.” JT struggles to recover, to sound casual. “I shouldn’t have asked.” 

“No I get it.” Malcolm is trying to sound casual too, doing a much worse job of it. “She’s your partner after all, it’s natural to feel a little protective.”

JT thinks that for a guy who makes a living off reading people, Malcolm sure can be dense sometimes.

“Like if our positions were reversed, I’d definitely want to make sure she wasn't dating someone—you know, someone like me...” The profiler is charging full speed ahead, and the sharp turn this conversation has taken makes JT’s head hurt. 

The cop holds up a hand to stop the tirade, is pretty sure he lost control of this runaway train a long time ago. “Bright,” he interrupts patiently. “I told you, it’s fine. Like I said, it really ain’t my business either way.” 

Malcolm lets out a long breath, runs a hand through his hair. Props his hands on his hips and then drops them away. He’s nodding, and the nerves bubbling out of him are half annoying and half concerning. 

“Hey.” JT can’t stay silent another second, knows he’s still overstepping but doesn’t care. “Are you… are you okay?”

“Yes. Absolutely,” Malcolm says too quickly, pastes on a smile like he’s trying to prove it. “Oh, coffee—”

And just like that he’s padding back towards the kitchen.

JT stands right where he’s at, knows his blank confusion is written all over his face. He’s trying to be patient but Bright is strung out and spiraling, and it’s not something he knows how to control. Isn’t sure if he should even try or just ride it out.

He might not be a psychologist, but he thinks he knows a manic episode when he sees one. What triggered it seems to be the real mystery. Only a day or two ago Malcolm was fine, or at least, the closest thing he ever comes to it.

Malcolm doesn’t make it as far as the kitchen, stops abruptly halfway across the room. He turns around and fixes a look on JT the cop doesn’t quite understand.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” he breathes unsteadily, like it took him a lot of effort to work up the nerve. “About what happened.”

“Oh, okay.” The cop shakes his head slightly, trying to keep up. “We’re doing this. Right now.”

He’s half-joking, but Bright isn’t. The profiler is standing there looking like a bomb that’s about to explode, an ironic metaphor if there ever was one.

“It’s not that I don’t wanna talk about it,” JT says carefully, taking a slow step toward Bright, feeling like he’s a skittish animal the cop might scare away if he moves too quick. “I just… I guess I ain’t exactly sure how.”

“You were right,” Bright says in place of an answer. 

As JT gets closer to him he can pick up on the kid’s stress. Dilated pupils, shaking hands that can’t hold still. He’s not sure what Malcolm’s scared of, but he hopes to hell it isn’t  _ him _ . After everything they’ve been through at this point, the thought makes him nauseous.

He stops just out of arm’s reach, giving the kid space. Making sure Bright knows he has his full attention.

“You’re gonna have to be a little more specific,” he says calmly, wondering if something happened or if Malcolm has really just spent the last few days just working himself into a frenzy. Maybe everything just finally caught up to him. 

“It’s funny because I spend so much time trying to find answers, to get people to just be honest with me for once—just to find the truth, and when I finally do it’s like…” Bright looks frustrated. He’s still not making much sense and seems to know it. “ _ You _ told me the truth, and you were right, and I ignored you.”

JT is still completely at a loss for words. He wonders if he should have a clue what Malcolm’s going on about. 

“You told me I’d be a liability. You were right. I was just—I was just so stupid, and it got you hurt.”

And just like that, the light bulb comes on. JT is catapulted back through the days - or weeks, maybe? Time has become a painfully arbitrary concept. He’s back standing on the sidewalk in the overcast gloom, spitting out harsh words full of exasperation and hidden truths.

“Let me try and get this straight...” The cop speaks slowly, trying to clarify what he thinks he might already know. “You been holding on to some bullshit I said a week ago, this whole time?”

Bright won’t look at him. There’s a muscle working in his jaw as he stares at the back of the couch, his hands clenching and unclenching.

JT thinks if he were a smarter man, he would have seen this coming. It’s a scenario that’s both hit him out of left field, and gone exactly according to script. While he barely remembers that ill-fated conversation, hadn’t even thought of it again until now, it’s not a surprise that Bright does. That he’s been turning it over it in his brain all this time. 

“Look at me,” he says firmly, determined not to get angry. Not at Bright, and not at himself. There have already been too many misunderstandings between them, too many roadblocks. He’ll be damned if he lets this turn into another one. 

He takes a step forward, into Malcolm’s space. His mere presence forcing the kid to either give ground or meet him where he stands. It takes time—too much time—but eventually Bright drags his eyes up, meeting the cop’s gaze with a storm raging in his eyes.

“You plantin’ bombs now?” JT asks him, holding that eerie gaze. “Droppin’ buildings on your own head? Were you the one who hit that trigger, huh?”

Malcolm’s eyes make a little darting motion like he wants to look away again, but he doesn’t. It’s a contest of wills between them, and JT doesn’t blink. Thinks that for once, he knows how to stay in control of this.

“I jumped without thinking,” the kid says blankly. “I do it all the time.”

“So what? In cop work we call that instinct.”

“You got hurt.” 

There’s so much guilt in his voice, and it makes the cop’s chest feel tight. 

“So did you. I’m pretty tough, believe it or not,” JT says as softly as he can, thinking it’s sobering to realize that Bright’s been trapped just like him, in the replayed  _ almost _ moments and endless  _ what if’s _ . “I’ll bounce back, y’know.”

They’re both silent, and JT knows he needs to say more. Make sure Bright gets it through his head that out of all the heavy things he carries around with him like Atlas with the world on his shoulders,  _ this _ isn’t one he needs to keep holding on to. 

“I don’t blame you.” He opts for blunt force, knowing if he’s going to get through to Malcolm he can’t mask it under jokes and implied camaraderie. “I blame Grezny. He’s the only one who did this to us, to  _ both  _ of us. It’s ain’t your fault and it ain’t mine.”

It’s almost difficult to say, reminding him that Malcolm hasn’t been the only one walking around dragging guilt like dead weight. It’s been suffocating him, too. 

“What matters is we’ve got him now, and he’s gonna go away for a long time for what he did to us.”

Malcolm looks up at him, and he looks so damn miserable. Lost and reeling for a lifeline. Like maybe he wants to believe it but he’s too caught in his own destructive cycles. And if he hasn’t been able to break those himself, how is JT ever going to?

“So you tell me, rainman. Am I lying to you?” An offer and a challenge.

Malcolm’s lips twitch like he wants to smile. His eyes flicker across the cop’s face, and it’s half a second before he’s shaking his head. Not nearly long enough to know for sure.

“No. You’ve never lied to me.” He says it like he’s thinking aloud, like JT isn’t standing right there. 

The cop doesn’t even know how to begin unpacking that one, dissecting the volumes of unsaid things that lie beneath the simple words. It’s both touching and terrifying to understand that Malcolm has that kind of faith in him. It’s not a trust he deserves.

“Truth is maybe… maybe we’re both a little fucked in the head after what happened.” A comfort as much an admission, a reminder that they’re in this together. Tired soldiers home from the same war. Both flailing for solid ground to stand on. 

JT takes a deep breath and pushes on. “And Gil’s gonna try and Dani’s gonna try, cause they’re good people, but they don’t really know what we went through. We do. Like it or not, this is what we get now. This is what we gotta do to move forward.”

He thinks of other men who said the same things to him once, a long time ago. Thinks he didn’t believe them at the time but maybe he does now. 

Malcolm’s listening to him, the cop can tell. There’s a line between his brows and a shadowed tension to the corners of his eyes. Little movements and microexpressions JT’s never been close enough to see before.

“We just gotta, you know… find a way out. Find a direction for it...” He trails off, reminded of McAllister for the first time in years. 

JT hasn’t thought about him in a long time, not until he finds himself standing here on the other side of the glass. Finally recognizing that the words of pained wisdom the soldier used to offer him came out of a similar place. Shared heartache. Gaping wounds. The kind of recognition that only comes with age and experience, with knowing that sometimes it’s too much for any one man to carry alone. 

There’s a visible struggle in Malcolm’s eyes, the push and pull of conflicting emotions. Like he’s torn between falling to pieces right there on the spot and pulling it back together, a balancing act on a knife’s edge. 

“Direction,” Malcolm echoes quietly, like he’s thinking too hard about it. Trying to find the literal meaning. “Does that mean we’re getting drunk again?”

JT scoffs, shaking his head once. “If there’s anything the Army taught me, besides how to abuse Motrin, it’s that you only drink when you got something to celebrate. Not something to bury.”

Bright lets out a shaky laugh, and JT thinks maybe he was able to turn it around. Keep the kid’s slipping defenses patched together.

“I know you never liked me.” The kid cracks a little, like it breaks him to say it aloud. “But I thought if I just worked long enough, and hard enough… I don’t know maybe…” His voice fades away into nothingness.

He doesn’t have to finish. JT knows what he’s saying, and it kills him that he put Malcolm in a position where he was desperate to prove himself. To JT, of all people. 

He thinks again of what Gil told him in the hospital.  _ He looks up to you.  _

For the first time, he thinks he sees it.

The cop has no idea how to tell him the truth. That Malcolm was a challenge to JT’s hard-won order, to routine and peaceful complacency. The kind of person who made him question himself every day, doubt who he was and what he believed. He doesn’t know how to say that all his misplaced resentment should never have been aimed at Bright, but at himself. 

“Think I like you well enough now,” he hears himself say, and it’s not sarcastic or defensive or deflecting humor. He’s not making calculated efforts to be strong or stoic. Just peeling back his edges like he did in the blood and darkness, letting Bright crawl underneath. Praying silently that he’ll make it painless.

He hasn’t let anyone in this close to him in so long, in so many empty years. He wonders if Malcolm can tell how much it scares him. 

JT is acutely aware of how close they’re standing now. Malcolm smells like coffee and shampoo and something vaguely sweet, and it lingers in the cop’s senses. Distracting and consuming. 

And he’s still comfortable in a way he can’t absorb, weightless in the kid’s orbit. He doesn’t know when that happened. Isn’t sure when he started spinning around Malcolm’s sun, even knowing how easily it could flare out and burn him without warning. He’s not sure how a man who bleeds chaos out of every pore could possibly have that effect on him. He only knows it feels right, and he doesn’t want to lose it.

He’s not really thinking about it as he lifts a hand and touches, slowly brushing the ugly bruise on Malcolm’s jaw that he hates looking at so much. He’s not thinking at all. 

Bright reminds him of other faces, other people he felt compulsively drawn to protect, and that scares him too. The idea that something—someone—could have placed that hold on him without his permission... It’s mindlessly terrifying. 

Knowing how goddamn painful it is when the universe inevitably rips those things out of your life, leaving wounds that don’t heal. 

Malcolm shudders, and leans into the hand on his skin like nobody’s touched him in years, and he’ll be damned if that doesn’t tug him right apart at the seams.

Later on, looking back, he could have sworn something took control of his body for a moment. Everything shuts down except for blind impulse, that overwhelming animal instinct that lives in his gut that looks at Malcolm and says  _ protect him at all costs.  _

JT leans in and kisses him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the cliffy. Please forgive. In exchange, a day early on the update?
> 
> Stay tuned for a Christmas fic coming tomorrow night as well, it's twenty pages of absolutely tooth-rotting fluff.
> 
> Thank you again to @eringeosphere for her beautiful beta work!


	10. Chapter Ten

The second their lips meet, the roar of noise that’s been filling JT’s world, filling his head, fades out completely. It’s utter, blissful silence and soft lips under his own.

He wasn’t thinking far enough ahead to be prepared for Malcolm’s reaction. It’s instantaneous, no hesitation at all. He kisses JT back like he’s the only thing that exists, a dying man fighting for oxygen. Twists his hands in the bigger man’s shirt and holds on to him for dear life.

The cop feels all the air leave his lung in a glorious rush, and his entire universe funnels down to the way Bright feels against him, the way his lips taste. Like there’s not a goddamn thing in the past or the future more important than this exact moment. 

Like all good things, it doesn’t last for long.

As soon as rational thought starts coming back, so does cold, ruthless understanding.

_ Oh shit. _

JT pulls back abruptly and his mind is blank, stalled out and stuttering to a halt. 

He can’t wrap his brain around what just happened, what he’s done. 

“Sorry,” he says dumbly, and it’s not the right thing to say in the moment, but nothing is.

“Why?” Bright challenges him breathlessly, and it sounds so simple and so plain and honest, like JT didn’t just tip the scales between them in the most catastrophic way.

He doesn’t know how to answer that. 

Malcolm’s staring at JT with eyes that speak volumes, but it’s all in a language he can’t read.

The cop knows he should be mortified, reeling and reaching for an escape. He just kissed  _ Bright _ for chrissakes, and even more confusing, the kid kissed him back. It’s a gauntlet of emotions he doesn’t feel prepared to traverse. Too much, too quickly. 

There’s a war raging in both their heads as they stand there silently, listening to each other breathe. 

Bright tips his chin up just a fraction of an inch, like he’s challenging the cop to take it back. To backpedal and flail for purchase on unsteady ground, sweep it all away like it never happened. Unfathomable layers of emotion. Fear layered in quiet strength, like he’s anticipating rejection, maybe even rage.

It’s ironic to catch that glimpse, JT thinks, when the cop is the one who backed them into this corner in the first place.

And Malcolm still won’t back down, won’t say anything, won’t offer him an easy out. His lips are slightly parted, swollen and pink from their shared kiss, and JT hasn’t so much as  _ looked  _ at anybody in years but he’s sure as hell looking now. 

“Fuck,” he hears himself groan out, doesn’t recognize his own voice.

He watches Bright’s pupils dilate, flicker from JT’s eyes to his lips in a passing breath. It’s such a simple movement, subtle, but it’s enough to push him over the edge he’s teetering on. Terrified of falling over, hoping he does. 

Before he can stop himself he’s surging forward again, kissing the kid like he means it. His hand is tangled in hair that’s impossibly soft, wrapped around a sharp jaw. Pushing his chin up for a better angle. 

And he tastes  _ sweet _ like blue raspberry, not cigarettes and sand and stolen need. 

It’s intoxicating.

The way Bright kisses him back strips him of control; reminds him that he’s kissing another man and he doesn’t have to be gentle about it. He instinctively pushes Malcolm back against the wall, holding him there with his own body while he dives into his mouth like he’s trying to get lost there. Malcolm’s half his size and as pliant as clay under his hands, reacting to every touch, and it sets something off in the cop he doesn’t recognize. 

He’s not sure how it happens. Maybe it’s all reflex and muscle memory, but he finds himself shoving his leg between Malcolm’s, feels the growing hardness against his thigh. It lights a fire inside him he hasn’t felt in years. Bright’s not helping him in his battle to maintain some semblance of self-control, rocking his hips up in rhythm and the sheer, delicious friction is already enough to leave JT seeing stars. 

Malcolm kisses like it might be the last thing he’ll ever do, all desperation and need. 

And JT has spent countless years hiding this part of himself, ruthlessly tamping down the urges that life and experience have taught him are, in no uncertain terms, strictly taboo… but he doesn’t know a man alive who could keep it pulled together while he’s getting kissed like that. 

There’s an infinite heartbeat in time where he doesn’t think about anything, just lets himself fall into Bright’s gravity and the way his lips taste. Spiraling into the fire that builds in his gut and warms him from the inside out. 

Only a heartbeat. 

He peels himself away with some effort, sharply conscious of how easy it would be to fall into each other like a house of cards. To bend and fold and get swept away. 

He stares down at Bright like he’s never seen him before. Not really.

There’s something heartbreaking in the way Malcolm looks right now, the angles of his face thrown into sharp relief in the light. He’s breathless and flushed, strikingly vulnerable and goddamn _ invincible  _ all in the same heartbeat. There’s a calmness to him now that wasn’t there before, nervous mania dissolved under blind passion.

JT’s big hand is still halfway around the kid’s throat, holding him in place, tracking the jackrabbit thrum of a racing pulse. The sight is enough to flood his veins with a powerful rush, awakening long-dormant thrills of need, possession, control. 

And goddamn him, Bright’s not helping. Leaning into that touch, baring his throat like a challenge or a promise, reacting to the bigger man’s dominant hold like he needs it just as badly. Little telltale signals that light the cop’s nerves on fire. 

He thinks maybe, there’s a chance that he understands Malcolm after all. Thinks maybe he spent so long focusing on the divide between them, insurmountable differences and sharp contrast, that he didn’t see  _ this _ . Keys and locks, pins and tumblers slotting into place. Tiny pieces of a massive, impossible riddle suddenly arranging themselves while he watches. 

“You don’t do anything by halves, do you,” he manages to say at last, his voice a note deeper, rougher than usual.

“I was gonna say the same thing to you.” Bright’s retort is airy and breathless, and it goes straight to JT’s cock.

He feels his fingers twitch, his grip tightening on pale skin for only a fraction of an instant. 

Slowly, reluctantly, the cop lets his hand fall away. 

His body is still riding the rush of endorphins and lust, but his mind is setting off warning bells. All he wants to do is lean forward an inch or two and claim Malcolm’s lips again, get lost in the only thing that’s made him feel alive in years, but there’s a part of him that knows it isn’t right. Isn’t what either of them need right now. It feels too much like using each other as an escape, another self-destructive habit to drown out the noise in their heads. 

And maybe, selfishly, that’s exactly what he wants… but it’s not  _ all _ he wants.

“I uh, sorry.” Malcolm blushes, and just seeing the color flood his skin is enough to get JT’s heartrate up all over again. 

Why the hell he’s apologizing is a mystery, and JT thinks it’s probably a clue that he was right to stop before they got ahead of themselves.

“Why?” he asks, echoing Bright’s words from a few minutes ago. 

The air is heavy between them, charged with an electricity they can’t flip off as easily as they flipped it on. 

Malcolm’s hand is pressed against his ribs and it takes too long for JT to notice, to catch the pale caste to his skin under the flush of exertion. 

It’s like getting cold water thrown on his face, bringing him plummeting back down to reality.

“Hey, what happened,” he hears himself say, reaching for Bright’s hand. He gently peels the kid’s palm away, revealing flecks of blood on the white fabric. 

JT feels his stomach drop through the floor, his breath catching in his throat. The hand he’s holding in his own is shaking violently, little drops of crimson running down Malcolm’s fingers.

“ _ Shit _ .” The cop feels like he’s been punched in the gut. “Shit. Come on, sit down—”

He guides Malcolm by the shoulders to a seat on the couch, tuning out the breathless mantra of  _ I’m fine, I’m fine _ falling off the kid’s lips. JT leaves him there long enough to make it into the kitchen for a hand towel. He comes back to kneel on the floor and lift the thin t-shirt away from the seeping wound underneath.

“Goddamit, you’re bleeding through,” he swears as he catches sight of the leaking gauze and tape, stained red. 

“I know what you’re thinking,” Malcolm is rambling in a rush of air, all nerves, “it wasn’t you. Wasn’t your fault. I pulled a stitch earlier and redressed it myself, I guess I didn’t exactly do a good job—”

“What?” JT wants to shake him, inwardly hopes it’s just Malcolm’s attempt to make him feel a little less guilty. “ _ How _ ?”

“It’s a long story?”

“I got time,” the cop grinds out, the sudden surge of stress making him touchier than he’d like. “Where’s your first aid kit?”

Malcolm looks briefly panicked, an expression that comes and goes quickly. “It’s not bleeding much, honestly,” he protests. “You don’t have to—”

“Bright.” The cop isn’t having it, leaning forward and looking the kid right in the eyes. “Shut the fuck up. Okay? Just for like, five minutes. Shut up, sit there, and tell me where the damn kit’s at.”

JT wouldn’t have been surprised in the least if he started a full-on fight with his harsh tone, but then again, Bright is always surprising him. Malcolm deflates a bit, almost sinking back into the couch. He stares at the man across from him and presses his lips together. 

JT watches the pride in his eyes crumble, slip away entirely.

“Bathroom.”

A grudging defeat. JT lets the air out of his lungs and stands, hoping the kid’s not dumb enough to try to move during his absence. He finds the first aid kit on the sink in the adjoining bathroom, and there’s a smear of blood on the handle that makes him think Bright was telling the truth. That maybe this isn’t somehow his fault, even if it feels that way. 

He brings it back and sits down on the coffee table, pinching the bridge of his nose with the hand that’s not stained with Malcolm’s blood. He’s furious. Angry that Bright would try to hide this, but mostly at himself for not noticing that something was wrong. And maybe anger isn’t even the right word for it. Maybe it’s fear. 

“How’d you tear your stitches, Bright?”

Malcolm looks ashamed and defeated, his face falling as he averts his eyes. 

“ _ Bright _ .” JT’s patience is wearing thin. 

“I fell asleep.” 

His voice is so quiet that the cop thinks he might not have heard correctly, and he pauses as he unpacks the white and red box beside him.

It takes him a moment to process the words, staring at the side of Malcolm’s face because he’s turned away, determined not to look at JT. 

The cop doesn’t say anything after that, because he’s still working it out. Thinking of how Bright doesn’t sleep, didn’t even sleep in the hospital with the help of heavy medications. How he thrashed and fought through every second of unconsciousness like it was physically painful for him. 

He’s quiet as he firmly lifts Malcolm’s arm out of the way and changes the hasty dressings. It’s a relief to see the damage doesn’t look all that bad, two broken stitches oozing a steady stream of blood. 

At the same time, catching sight of the wound itself for the first time makes him feel painfully nauseated. He never got a good look at it while they were trapped, too busy trying to staunch the flow of blood and keep Bright conscious in the dark. He’s looking at a massive gash the length of his hand surrounded by mottled bruises, and JT’s never been queasy about this kind of thing before but it’s sure as hell hitting him this time. 

“I’m not going back to the hospital.” Malcolm surprises him by being the one to break the tension. Turns steely blue eyes on JT like he’s expecting an argument, dropping a deceptively strong hand to grip the cop’s wrist. “I’m not.”

JT just looks at him, trying to interpret the turmoil, anger, fear he can see looking back at him. Features paper-white and pinched with pain.

“Okay,” he says simply. 

He thinks it might be a bad idea, but it’s a compromise he can allow for now. The cop knows enough about field medicine to tell the cut isn’t infected, that the torn stitches are likely incredibly painful but not life-threatening. It’s likely they would have been taken out in a few days anyways.

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” he concedes as he slowly pries Bright’s grip off his arm, cleans off his hands. “It’s gonna hurt like a bitch.”

“That’s new,” Malcolm retorts sardonically, a little color coming back to his face as he slowly relaxes. “Don’t worry. High pain tolerance, remember?”

The cop shakes his head. “Yeah you’ve said that before. What’s that from, besides puttin’ yourself through the blender every other week?” 

A shadowed look passes across Malcolm’s eyes, and it’s gone as quickly as it came. He doesn’t answer and JT gets the feeling he shouldn’t push his luck.

JT busies himself with packing up the gauze and bandages, because his thoughts are already veering back to what happened between them a few minutes ago, and he’s trying to figure out what to do. How to navigate a situation that blindsided him.

“Can we go back to kissing now?”

JT fumbles, drops the tube of antiseptic he’s holding, cursing under his breath as it rolls under the couch. 

“I have to say, I never saw that one coming,” Bright says casually, a note of breathless wonder in his voice as his head lolls back against the cushion. He doesn’t seem to realize he just threw the other man for a loop. “Never figured you’d kiss me first.”

“Wait—what?” JT sits up on the coffee table, staring at the kid, the medicine in his hand completely forgotten. “First?”

Malcolm rolls his head back the other way, looks at him. “Well, yeah. I always figured I’d do something really stupid, and I’d kiss you, and then you’d punch me in the face and never talk to me again.”   
  


There’s not a single brain cell left in JT’s head that’s capable of processing that concept. “You… thought about doing that before…?”   
  


Malcolm raises his eyebrows at him like he’s the dumbest creature alive, and in the moment JT’s actually inclined to agree with him. 

“When?”

“I think the first time it crossed my mind was back at Reichman, in the warehouse,” Bright says, and he finally looks a little unsure of himself. “Sorry. I know that’s weird.”

“We gotta stop apologizing to each other.” JT lets out a mirthless laugh, rubbing his face with both hands. “This is…”

“Weird?”

“A little.”

Malcolm looks strangely dejected at that, nodding and dropping his eyes away. Sometimes JT could swear the kid hears him say words that have never come out of his mouth. He thinks this might be one of those times.

“I’m still processing,” he says slowly, trying to figure out how to handle this new development. If he even should. 

Part of him thinks he’s disgusting, taking advantage of someone who’s clearly in no state, physically or mentally, to be having these conversations. Bright’s a strung-out ball of nerves and opiates, broken bones and ripped skin. If JT had an ounce of common decency he wouldn’t have put them in this position. Wouldn’t have crossed a line he can’t step back from.

Bright’s phone goes off, and it makes them both jump in the silence.

“I’ll grab it,” JT volunteers, standing without waiting for permission. He’s grateful to have something to do. He slides Malcolm’s phone off the counter and tosses it onto the cushion next to the kid.

The cop’s phone dings next, signalling a text. He slides open the notification sees that it’s from Dani.

_ Don’t freak out, okay? _

JT frowns at his screen, types out a reply.

_ What the hell does that mean? _

He hears Malcolm talking behind him, turns to look at him. 

“Thanks Gil,” the profiler says quietly into the phone, and his voice sounds strange. “Yeah. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Dreading what he’s about to see, JT drops his eyes to his phone, watches the text bubble pops up that indicates Dani is writing back. 

_ They’re working out a plea deal for Grezny. I’m sorry. _

JT squeezes the phone in his hand so hard he’s shocked he doesn’t crack it. So many emotions spark up in his chest at the same time that he can’t focus, can’t do anything but stand there and let them crash through him. 

He feels betrayed. Hopeless. Like everything they’ve been through over the past several weeks was for nothing. Waves of hot and cold flood his body in quick succession, and he forces himself to breathe. 

It feels like too much all at once. Burning highs and frigid, plummeting lows in quick succession. Thirty seconds ago his imagination was running wild with filthy possibilities, and now he’s just trying not to break something. The cop’s never been the type to lose his temper; he prides himself on it, even. But he’s been riding an emotional roller coaster for weeks now and he’s never felt more like he might snap at any moment. 

“The DA green-lit a plea deal if Grezny gives up his partner,” Bright finally says into the quiet, not turning around. 

“Yeah,” JT chokes out, trying to relax his grip, get himself under control. “Just heard.”

“Someone leaked the details to the press,” Malcolm monotones, like he’s talking about the weather and nothing more important than that. “Two dead bodies, two cops in the hospital. The city’s in a frenzy. DA doesn’t have a choice but to work damage control.”

A shuddering breath leaves his lungs, and JT feels the reaching tendrils of a headache wrapping its way around his skull. He circles the couch to stand in front of Malcolm, glancing at his face to read his reaction. 

Bright doesn’t look like  _ anything. _ Not angry or indignant or any of the million things ripping through the cop’s chest.

“You’re okay with this?” JT shakes his head in frustration. “Just like that, this fucker’s gonna walk, and you don’t care?”

Bright breathes out through his nose, his chest rising and falling in resignation. “I think we have to remember we have another suspect in the wind. A worse one.”

“Grezny tried to kill us. Almost did.”

“I know.”

The tension hanging in the air between them is thick and angry. 

It doesn’t feel real. The concept of letting Grezny off the hook in exchange for a few words is too much to process, too much to swallow. 

“We lived,” Bright says eventually, like maybe he’s struggling to believe it too. “Others might not be as lucky if we don’t put an end to it.”

JT thinks that right there in that moment, he doesn’t give a shit about other people. About the bigger picture or blind justice. He only knows that he’d hoped, for a few short days, that he could put the nightmares to rest, bury them under the knowledge that the cause of their torment would be spending the rest of his life behind bars. 

There’s no chance of that now.

The cop lifts both hands to his face, tries to stifle the groan of sheer frustration that crawls up out his chest. His head is pounding.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Malcolm says quietly. There’s an appology in there somewhere. Finally a crack in the apathy and logic. 

“Yeah. That’s the fucking problem.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Years! Does this count as a New Year's Kiss...?
> 
> Thanks again to my love @eringeosphere for the beta and #Brimel for the support!
> 
> (Btw come join us!)  
https://discord.gg/K6tqRws


	11. Chapter Eleven

Chunks of concrete covered in dust. Exposed rebar pointing up into a clouded sky like angry fingers. Endless fields of rubble, long since disintegrated into pieces and pebbles that crunch under JT’s boots. 

The cop stands on the sidewalk outside a line of yellow tape, listens to it snap and crack in the gusty wind. Stares at the wreckage with distant eyes. 

He’s back at the empty lot on Fairside. Drawn by unknown forces back to the place where he can’t help but feel like he lost a piece of himself. 

There are still deep grooves in the gravel where the fire engines came through. Massive square indents down to the stone where outriggers were jammed down to stabilize the aerial truck. Bits of tubing and discarded latex gloves littered across the gravel from the ambulance crews. A faded yellow bobcat and a skid-steer, still parked by the chain link fence across the lot. 

The sun has already dipped below the skyline, leaving the city cast in surreal shades of gloomy blue and gold. The temperature drops rapidly after dark this time of year, reminding the cop that he’s missing his jacket. Not just any jacket.  _ His. _ Bloodstained leather in a brown paper evidence bag, probably sitting in a box somewhere in the basement at the 1-6 precinct.

He’s breaking the first rule of recovery.

Talk about it.

Don’t stay in the dark. Don’t fall into it. Pull up a chair and have a seat, make peace with your trauma like a long lost friend. Don’t break eye contact.

He knows he shouldn’t have come back here. He should be at home watching TV with a cold beer, leaving the whiskey bottle safely hidden behind the microwave, checking his lingering fear and paranoia at the door. 

Instead he stands on the abandoned street, stares into the yawning pit where he thought he lost himself. Thought he was going to lose something else he’d come to care about, too. He thinks about blood and heartbreak and the things he can’t change. Wonders if there was ever a purpose to any of it, or if it was just another cruel trick of fate. Another bad luck roll of the dice. 

He stands there until it gets too dim to see, unfeeling in the cold, unseeing in the dark. Turns around and walks numbly back to his car.

**.**

JT spends another restless night twisting and turning, legs tangled in his sheets. He wakes up at odd intervals, the weight of senseless unease gripping him without warning. Drifts back off again, wakes up a few minutes later. It’s an exhausting process. 

It reminds him of the long months that passed in a sleepless haze after coming back from Afghanistan. The way nothing seemed real and breathing hurt. That constant feeling of waiting for  _ something _ to happen. Fight or flight triggered by a quick movement out of the corner of his eye, a car door slamming across the street. The kind of suspended animation that makes existing at all a battle he can’t escape. 

It’s well after midnight when he hears his cellphone buzzing on the nightstand.

He thinks about ignoring it. Of course, that’s quickly overruled by his overactive imagination, helpfully supplying about a dozen catastrophic scenarios that could warrant a call at this time of night. 

He rolls over, fumbling in the dark for his charger. Picks it up and sees Bright’s name on the screen.

“H’lo,” he slurs into the phone, wondering if he’s even awake yet or just having some sort of twisted dream. He’s too tired to tell the difference anymore.

“How do you feel about a stakeout?”

JT blinks hard into the gloom, rubs his eyes. Pulls his phone away from his face to double-check the caller ID. Definitely Malcolm, then.

“A stakeout,” he repeats flatly. Hoping he heard wrong.

“I went over Grezny’s file again. Did I mention I have copies? Anyways, there are some known associates we never got around to cross-checking because, well, we caught him. Or Gil did—someone caught him.”   
  


“You made copies of the files…” JT says groggily, thinking he’s not awake enough for information like that. 

“Well…. Most of them.”

“We’re not supposed to be working on the case.” It feels unnecessary even as he says it, even as he comes to the conclusion that of course Bright knows that. And of course he doesn’t care. “Gil told you we’re on admin leave, right?”

“Gil doesn’t have to know. Not unless we find something.” There’s a telling note of excitement in Bright’s voice, a shadow of that familiar old resolve. It sounds like the Malcolm he knows well, like the kid’s somehow already bounced back to his old optimism. 

“Why the fuck aren’t you sleeping right now?” Even as he asks the cop thinks he knows the answer. He presses his head back into his pillow and wonders how he ended up here. 

“I can sleep anytime.” Bright brushes it off easily, and he sounds alive and full of energy. “But tonight, well. We have places to be, things to do. Suspects to  _ stake _ .”

There’s not a doubt in JT’s mind that if turns the kid down flat, tells him no to his face, that Malcolm would still do it anyways. Find some trouble to get into with or without his assistance. 

Considering his options, the cop would much rather be there to intervene if that happens.  _ When  _ it happens.

“God, this is such a terrible idea.” JT grunts as he sits up in bed, giving up on sleep as he throws the blanket off. He sits on the edge of the mattress and drops his head into his hand.

“I mean, it’s not the  _ worst _ idea I’ve ever had,” Bright defends himself unconvincingly. “Just a little innocuous off-the-clock surveillance.”

For a long moment, the cop is tempted to hang up on him. Roll over and try again to get some sleep. He could put the whole ridiculous conversation behind him and stop humoring Malcolm’s obsession with the case. The rules are there for a reason.

Instead he thinks of Grezny in a cheap suit, greasy hair and narrow eyes, walking into a courtroom to take a plea deal. To sign his name and walk away from the damage he inflicted on JT, on Malcolm. On possibly countless other people who will never know the word justice thanks to all the loopholes in a blind system. 

The cop’s mouth tastes sour, and suddenly he's not tired at all. 

“Just surveillance?” He can’t resist asking.

He can  _ hear _ Malcolm grinning. “Simple stakeout. Nothing could possibly go wrong.”

“Shit.”

“Is that a yes?”

Scrunching up his face at himself, at his own spineless lack of resolve, JT drops his chin to his chest. “It’s… it’s a reminder to grab a coat. I’ll pick you up.”

“About that...”

The cop jumps at the sound of knuckles on wood, a sharp three-beat knock at his apartment door. 

“Bright... Are you at my place?”

“Possibly. Are you going to open the door?”

“This can’t be fucking happening,” JT growls at himself as he shuffles into the living room, flips on the porch light and double-checks the peephole.

Sure enough, there stands Bright in living color. Hair slicked back, a scarf pulled around his neck. He’s wearing a long wool coat and has his hands stuffed into his pockets. 

JT flips the deadbolt and pulls open the door, staring incredulously at the man standing on his welcome mat.

“Hi,” is what Malcolm says with a crooked grin, before he lets himself in and steps past JT.

“By all means,” the cop grumbles sarcastically, “won’t you come on in.”

He’s not sure how Bright knows his address and he’s not entirely sure he wants to ask. Apart from the colorful bruises still decorating his skin, the kid’s about as put together as he always is. An imperfect imitation of himself, and JT’s not dumb enough to think that’s an accident. 

It’s absurd to read so much into it, he thinks briefly, but he’s tempted to wonder if Malcolm’s compensating. Trying to present a picture of wholeness and health to make up for what transpired between them only a few hours ago. 

Bright’s eyes are already wandering, taking in every detail of the plain apartment. JT feels a little strange under the scrutiny, but guesses he shouldn’t have expected anything different. Figures there’s not much sleuthing for the kid to do in the sparsely furnished space and JT doesn’t exactly have anything to hide.

“So we’re doing this, huh?” JT collects his boots from their place by the door, sets them on a barstool under the kitchen counter. “How’d you even know I’d agree to any of it?”

“Oh, call it a hunch.” Bright is wandering around the small living room, snooping and doing a terrible job of hiding it. 

Sighing to himself, JT momentarily abandons his unexpected guest to pad into the bedroom, pull on a clean t-shirt and jeans. He brushes his teeth, grabs a canvas jacket and a Jets ballcap. 

When he returns to the living room Malcolm has zeroed in on the Guns n’ Hoses title belts stacked four deep on the corner bookshelf. 

“You’re a boxer,” the kid remarks. He doesn’t sound surprised. 

“Uh, yeah. I used to be.” JT pulls on his boots, wondering how he’s even functioning on three fragmented hours of sleep and sheer willpower. “Lost my training time when I joined Major Crimes. Gave it up.”

“When did you start?”

That’s specific enough to give the cop pause, make him think a little too hard to come up with an accurate answer. “I was ten or twelve, maybe? Switched to football, then enlisted.”

There’s a hum of interested acknowledgment, like Malcolm is interpreting more from the vague bits of information than JT meant to relay. Still an unnerving habit, but not quite as annoying as it used to be. 

Still feeling a little sluggish, the cop makes a mental list of what he needs. Keys, phone, wallet.  _ Gun. _ He’s not about to jump headfirst into whatever Malcolm has planned unarmed. 

He retrieves a CZ 75 from the safe in his bedroom closet. Out of the dozen or so guns in his collection, it’s his pride and joy, soothingly familiar in his hand. He takes the time to be grateful he wasn’t carrying it on duty a week ago. It would’ve been a harder loss than his department-issued Glock, the replacement for which is already sitting in a locker at the station.

The cop hesitates for a moment, still unsure if he’s making the wisest possible choices in his dragging exhaustion, and picks out a compact revolver for Bright.

“Here.” He extends the weapon to Malcolm as he returns to the living room. “Just in case.”

Bright looks a little surprised, but doesn’t reject the offering. He takes the gun and tucks it into the inside pocket of his coat, and the fact that he doesn’t check the cylinder first stresses JT out a little more than it should. 

“You know how to use that thing, right,” the cop asks, trying not to sound as nervous as he feels.

“I did retire from the FBI recently, you know.” Malcolm’s lips twitch into a smile. “They  _ do  _ train us.” 

“Retired, huh.” JT shakes his head. “Is that what we’re calling it...”

Malcolm shrugs unapologetically. His flippant attitude is both a little concerning, and strangely relieving to see. It feels like having the old Malcolm back.

The cop retreats to the kitchen, examining his sparse cupboards for stakeout-worthy provisions. Settles on stuffing a box of granola bars and a bag of beef jerky into a backpack. Empty shelves and a fridge that’s mostly beer reminds him he should probably use his newfound vacation time to do some grocery shopping.

“Who’s this?”

JT turns, distracted, to see what Malcolm’s looking at. Words die on his lips as he sees him holding a plain black picture frame.

He shakes his head wordlessly, unable to come up with a reply. 

Bright is staring at the old photo, studying it like it’s something fascinating. 

The picture is of JT and a handful of soldiers from his unit, standing in front of an armored truck in Kabul. He’s notably younger, defined muscles rippling under a tan t-shirt. Dark sunglasses and a bright white grin. He has his arm thrown around Mikey, young and vivacious with bright green eyes. The blonde is wearing JT’s helmet and laughing like he owns the whole damn world. 

A handful of other soldiers crowd around them, personal space a detail of the civilian world they’d long ago left behind. 

“He’s very handsome,” Malcolm says, and there’s not a hint of  _ anything  _ in his voice. Jealousy or awkwardness or hesitation. It’s innocent and simple. 

If the cop ever wondered how much of their conversation under steel and stone Malcolm would remember, he supposes he has his answer now. 

JT rounds the counter and slowly walks over to him, his eyes fixed on that stupid picture. There’s a layer of dust on the shelf, settled in a perfect clean square around the place where it’s been laying face-down for years.

Malcolm offers a half-smile, hands JT the frame when he slowly reaches for it. 

The cop stares at it. He’s made a point to stop looking at the damn thing, been so disciplined for so long. He used to hold it against his chest while he laid on his couch and made entire bottles of whiskey disappear in a night.

“It was a long time ago,” he says hollowly. Allows himself another moment to trace familiar features, scarcely recognizing a much younger, happier version of himself. “You gotta let things die sometimes.”

He puts the picture back. Glass down in the square of dust.

“Come on.” He turns towards the door, picks up his keys and makes a point of avoiding eye contact. “I need caffeine.” 

**.**

They stop off at a gas station down the street. Malcolm is already buried under a pile of files in the passenger seat, so JT leaves him to it.

He’s not sure if he can get Bright to eat, and more importantly isn’t sure he has the energy to try, so he opts for caffeine instead. Dumps as much sugar and creamer into the paper cup as he can and fills the rest with coffee. Figures he can at least get some calories into the kid that way. 

The air is cold enough to hint at coming snow by the time he slides back into the driver’s seat, wordlessly passes the coffee across the center console. New York is in for an early winter, and JT isn’t looking forward to it in the slightest.

“What is this?” Malcolm wraps his hands around the warm cardboard sleeve even as JT cranks on the heater. “It’s delicious.”

“Sugar, mostly,” JT grumbles, but it takes some work to keep a smug grin off his face. He figures at least he can get coffee right, if nothing else.

Bright groans in approval, and it’s not the appropriate time for it but the sound definitely sends JT’s mind straight back to the exact moment he’s been doing his best  _ not  _ to think about.

Malcolm’s lips under his. Blurred lines and crumbling barriers. Tipping the pendulum into something wholly unexpected, even if JT now thinks he probably could have seen it coming if he tried. Could have been self-aware enough to feel something inside of himself shifting. Leaning into Malcolm’s light.

The cop clears his throat, drags his mind out of the gutter with pointed effort. Malcolm hasn’t so much as hinted at bringing up what happened between them and JT’s not about to be the first to breach the subject. 

“So uh. Where to?”

“Oh, right. So Grezny’s old prison cellmate lives in the Bronx. Before we served the warrant on his place, that was gonna be our next stop.”

JT shifts back in his seat thoughtfully, feeling his spine crack and pop. “You don’t think Gil’s already dropped in to talk to the guy?” 

“Maybe. But Grezny’s willing to talk now. They probably wouldn’t have chased down a lead with a suspect already in custody. Either way, if he’s not our second killer, maybe he knows who is.”

JT figures that’s sound enough reasoning for the time being, so he puts the jeep in gear and follows the profiler’s directions. 

He’s not used to running on fumes the way Malcolm seems to be, so he’s still trying to wrap his head around what they’re doing. Impulsively agreeing to head out and stalk a lead in the middle of the night, off the books. Flipping the metaphorical middle finger to the administrative paperwork he signed not even a week ago. If he told anyone who knew him at all what he was up to tonight, they’d laugh at the idea. 

Hell, a week ago, he would have laughed too. 

The cop’s life has run on rules and parameters and strict guidelines for so damn long. Knowing exactly what he needs to be doing and why. Having a reason for it, a rulebook to reference for every situation. 

Stepping off into empty air like this, trusting that forces unknown will stop his fall, is terrifying and exhilarating and a million other things he can’t process. He’s not impulsive. He doesn’t leap before he looks and he’s never been that person, not even as a kid. Skipped straight through the rebellious teenager phase to take on the burden of a fractured family, a mom and sister who depended on him. 

In a way he thinks he may have missed out. In others, he thinks it was exactly what he needed. Regardless of his age, having someone who depended on him was strangely comforting. Filled a hole in his chest he’s only recently come to recognize. 

This is who he is. His entire identity wrapped up in becoming a human shield for the people he cares about, and that’s always been a short list with a steep admission. He isn’t sure how or when Malcolm’s name landed on it.

“You’re thinking too loud,” the profiler says, and JT snaps out of his own head. Doesn’t know how he got lost in the first place.

“Just tired.” It’s an automatic reply, and he knows that even though it’s true it’s the kind of poor excuse that wouldn’t fool a child. 

He glances over at Bright, catches intense blue eyes and looks away quickly. It’s still hard to get used to, knowing that most of the time the profiler knows what’s going on in his head before he does. Reading between the lines. 

Malcolm doesn’t push it, which probably has more to do with that fact that they’re approaching their destination than it does lack of interest. 

“Well this is a shithole,” JT grumbles to change the subject, peering through lightly fogged glass at the pre-fabs and trailers populating the run-down neighborhood. 

“You expected Carnegie Hill?” 

Despite himself the cop huffs out a laugh, killing the headlights as he pulls up to the curbless sidewalk and puts the car in park. Their target is a trailer a few lots down the street, all mismatched siding coated in peeling blue paint. There’s a plastic pool collecting leaves in the front yard, a child’s bike abandoned on the sidewalk. A dim yellow porch light and dark windows. 

Neither man speaks for a moment as they settle in. JT feels a little foolish now that they’re here, knowing they’re probably in for a long night of absolutely nothing, staring at a dark trailer until sunrise. 

At least it’s better than the alternative. Better than tossing and turning on his couch until dawn without finding rest.

The cop looks over as Malcolm digs into his messenger bag, produces a pair of binoculars that are probably worth as much as his car payment. 

“You really ain’t messing around,” JT mutters, unsure if he’s more skeptical or impressed.

“I never mess around.” Malcolm’s eyes sparkle with mischief. He fiddles with the binoculars briefly and passes them across to JT. 

The cop thinks that’s a truckload of bullshit, but lets out a long breath through his nose and takes the damn things anyway.

“Remember we’re just here to observe,” he feels the need to remind Malcolm as he works the focus dials experimentally, turning them over in his hands. “We’re gonna sit here and keep an eye on the house, and that’s  _ it _ .”

When an answer isn’t immediately forthcoming, JT lowers the binoculars, finds the profler watching him with an unreadable expression. 

“What?”

“You’re not sleeping,” Malcolm remarks, and it’s a reminder that he hasn’t forgotten JT’s earlier lapse of concentration. 

It’s a comment that invites explanation. JT toys with the concept of changing the subject again and just as quickly dismisses it. Their night is going to be bad enough at this rate. He doesn’t need to make it any worse by being surly. 

All things considered, they’re far past the polite distance stage.

“Nope.” He opts for the bare minimum, wondering if it’s futile to hope the kid will drop it. 

No such luck.

“Nightmares?”

JT visibly winces at that, drops the binoculars and huffs out a sigh. This isn’t the kind of thing men like him talk about. Not sober, anyway. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, sucks on his lip. He takes a moment to orient himself before chancing another look at Malcolm, trying to gauge him. 

Malcolm grimaces apologetically. “Too personal?”

The cop isn’t sure how to answer that. Normally, it would absolutely be too personal. Against all the rules. No feelings, no depth. No scrambling demons tearing at the walls, desperate to poke their heads out of the pitch blackness and bare their teeth. 

But he thinks about all the things he’s already told the kid. Bloody confession and decades-old secrets ripped out of him in the dust. Words that never saw the light of day before he met Bright. He thinks about how Malcolm doesn’t blink, literally or metaphorically, in the face of all the parts of himself that JT has always been ashamed of.

“Been dreamin’ about Afghanistan,” he grinds out through his teeth, wonders why it’s so hard to say out loud. “And shit that reminds me of Afghanistan.”

The unsaid words hang between them, an implication clear that he isn’t about to spell out. This is hard enough already.

JT can't look at the profiler this time, figures he’ll lose his nerve if he tries. He presses on. 

“Been thinkin’ maybe it’s karma. I was such a dick about it, you know. Everything you got goin’ on: the not sleeping, the nightmares. In this line of work anything that gets under your skin makes you…” The cop chokes on the word, feels shitty even saying it. “It makes you weak.” 

It’s been bothering him enough that it feels strangely relieving to say out loud. To admit that all the same things he once mocked Malcolm for have now come full circle to haunt him, too. A fitting punishment doled out by a vindictive universe. 

“I know,” Malcolm says plainly. “Everybody thinks that. Who knows… maybe it’s true.”

JT wasn’t sure what he was expecting but it wasn’t that, and the passive response is strangely irritating for no reason at all. The simple fact that Bright can still sit there and offer him unconditional acceptance and blind understanding. Withholding judgement even when that’s exactly what JT deserves. 

The cop thinks he might actually feel a little better about the whole thing if Malcolm reacted after all. Told him his suffering was nothing less than he deserved. Poetic justice. The cop’s fitting reward for a lifetime hiding behind blustering arrogance and false bravado.

“What do you dream about?” 

There’s a hesitation to Malcolm’s voice, quiet caution. Like he knows he’s pushing his luck but is willing to chance it. For his own curiosity or maybe something else. Trying to help in his own awkward way.

The cop turns to raise an eyebrow at the kid meaningfully. Doesn’t let himself look away this time. 

“Oh,” Malcolm breathes, understanding bleeding into his eyes.

JT drags his gaze away, wishing the kid wasn’t  _ quite _ so sharp. Able to pull volumes of information out of him in a word or a glance. A blessing and a curse. 

“You don’t dream about it?” He asks hollowly, staring out through the windshield without seeing anything. 

Bright shifts in his seat, a rustle of white-noise motion in the cop’s peripheral vision.

“It all kind of blends together at a certain point,” the profiler eventually says quietly. “Can’t dream if you can’t sleep.”

At least that’s something JT can understand. The human brain’s infuriating self-defense mechanisms kicking into gear, protecting the psyche by draining the body. He’s experienced it before. Thought he’d finally put it all behind him, proved himself wrong. He’s been doing that a lot lately.

“You know my nightmares—the night terrors—they come from things that happened when I was young. Things I couldn’t control.” Malcolm sounds entirely too clinical for the subject matter, laying out childhood trauma with casual detachment. “Manifestations of fear. For what might happen to me. For what  _ did  _ happen to me, because I can’t actually remember half of it…. Just bits and pieces.”

JT listens silently,  _ really _ listens for the first time. It feels like the air could break if he breathes wrong. He tunes in to the nearly-inaudible drumming of nervous fingers on Malcolm’s knee.

“With you, it’s different.” There’s a pause, a far-off note stealing into the profiler’s voice that’s difficult to interpret. “You’re not scared for you, what might happen to you, or already did. You’re afraid for everybody else.”

JT’s lungs hitch at that. He wonders if Bright can hear the stutter in his breathing over the roar of the heater. Wonders when the hell he’s going to stop being so surprised by the profiler’s cutting insight. 

“I really admire that.” Malcolm doesn’t seem to have the first clue that his words are hitting JT like a kick in the throat. “Between us, it probably makes you the better person.”

The cop shakes his head slightly, wondering how he’s supposed to follow that up. 

It’s another astounding moment of understanding. Clouds parting briefly to let the sun to come through like a searchlight beam. It’s realizing that the storm of genius and chaos sitting in his passenger seat somehow missed what JT was really trying to say in the first place. 

_ It’s you, you damn idiot.  _ He wants to grab the kid and shake him and say it right into his face so he gets it.  _ I’m fucking terrified of something happening to you.  _

As obvious as he thinks he’s tried to make it, he can’t say it out loud. Whether it’s pride, or shame or guilt or something else entirely he can’t put a name to. 

He wonders briefly if Malcolm’s just playing dumb. Pretending not to see something that JT feels so sure he’s screaming at him like a flashing neon billboard. In a heartbeat, the cop feels terrible for even thinking it. 

JT’s so used to seeing the worst in people, jumping to the darkest possible conclusion because in his life, that’s so often where the truth lies. Everyone he comes into contact with is damaged, dirty, selfish and clawing for something to corrupt. The worst humanity has to offer sliding across his desk as case files and mugshots. 

But not Malcolm. He isn’t like that, has managed to prove it time and time again, and from the word go that’s been enough to mystify and confuse the cop in the worst way possible. 

Chewed up and spit out by his own unlucky circumstances. Emerging battered and brave and optimistic. That doesn’t happen. Doesn’t make sense or follow the rules. 

JT’s still sorting it all into manageable chunks, working it out in his head like a puzzle he doesn’t have all the pieces to, and of course the profiler is still talking. Rambling again, probably misreading JT’s thoughtful silence as something else. He doesn’t seem to have a direction. Thinking out loud. 

“At the risk of overstepping… or just being wildly unhelpful, or both, it’s guilt. At least that’s what I’m told. Social or cultural conditioning, Gabrielle says. My therapist—you’d like her. Manifestations of an unresolved fight or flight instinct replayed by the subconscious.”

It’s at about this point that Malcolm seems seems to recognize the lack of feedback, and he cuts himself off abruptly. “And I definitely promised I’d stop doing that….”

“Hey,” JT interrupts. He waits for startled blue eyes to land on his. “It’s okay, kid. Really.”   
  


They’re both silent after that. JT feels like he has a lot to think about, and not much of a clue where to start. 

Bright turns on the radio and starts flipping through the channels aimlessly. 

The cop rubs at his eyes hard, reaches for his coffee. 

It’s going to be a long night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Throwing this up super fast before I drive home from work, but I will be answering C10 reviews here in the next few hours I promise. 
> 
> As usual, @eringeosphere brings you readable content and any remaining mistakes or murky bits are my fault entirely; she can only do so much with this mess <3
> 
> Also, in case you missed it: Newest Brimel one-shot, A Shot in the Dark just went up on Friday, which is a super angsty/dark/whump filled torture fic. A follow up will be coming for that soon as well!


	12. Chapter Twelve

The night flies. It’s predictably quiet, almost peaceful in this little run-down corner of the world. Every hour or so a car drives down the street past them and disappears around the block, or a dog starts barking in the distance over countless chain-link fences and cramped lawns. 

The blue trailer stands still and undisturbed, the single yellow bulb unblinking. 

JT thinks about it.  _ It _ .

The kiss.

The crossed line. 

It hangs between them, a guillotine blade glinting in the light. Deadly and beautiful, and the harder JT tries not to look directly at it the more it consumes his mind. 

It’s always there, lingering. Like catching a whiff of a scent that flings you back through time and memory to something you thought you forgot a long time ago. Glimpses of  déjà vu and nostalgia. Always at the edge of perception, blurred and out of focus, a mural of color through fogged up glasses.

It’s a mild annoyance at first, but like a pebble in your boot on a long ruck, it refuses to be ignored. 

Malcolm doesn’t bring it up, doesn’t even hint at it. JT still refuses to be the first to cave. It’s like they’re playing some kind of surreal game of chicken and Bright is eerily good at it. 

So good in fact, that it gets to the point where the cop’s brain starts coming up with all sorts of wild theories and questions. 

Is Malcolm going to pretend nothing happened? Is that what he  _ wants _ ? If it is, the cop isn’t sure why that idea bothers him so much. 

Taking it a step further, did the kiss ever happen in the first place? Or did sleep deprivation finally get the better of him and cause JT to start hallucinating strangely specific sexual scenarios involving his coworker?

The whole thing gives him a headache. Or maybe it’s the caffeine, or the fact he’s been spinning his wheels for days on end with little more than a nap here and there to break the monotony. He doesn’t have the energy to work through it all; trying only leaves him with more questions than he started with. 

Malcolm’s a glowing lightning rod of excess energy. Or maybe he’s just a night owl, or hyped up on a potent cocktail of medication and fixation. 

Either way, the kid doesn’t shut up.

A force of nature in his passenger seat, Bright bounces between overanalyzing the case files he “borrowed” from the precinct and literally everything else on the planet. He seems to have lapsed into the kind of familiarity that dispels his blundering caution, like once he realizes JT isn’t going to bite his head off for asking personal questions, the floodgates burst open.

Somehow, JT finds himself playing along. 

It’s three in the morning and he’s telling Bright about the little house in Harlem where he grew up. Spending his nights on the living room floor in a sleeping bag and mowing the neighbor’s lawn in exchange for hand-me-down sports equipment. Taking care of his mom and beating up the first boy who made his little sister cry on principal. Meeting the army recruiter that came into the gym on career day and told stories of far-off places and glory and brotherhood.

It’s the kind of deeply personal information he’s never imparted to anyone, not for as long as he can remember. He thinks it should bother him that it’s so easy. It definitely shouldn’t feel warm and oddly comfortable, like nobody’s given a shit about him in ages and he’s been unknowingly starving for it.

From the light in Malcolm’s eyes, the spark of fascination and curious hunger, JT thinks maybe he’s been starving too. 

Bright practices the kind of active listening that makes you feel like you’re the most important person in the world. A spotlight shining on your stage while an enraptured audience provides their undivided attention. He questions every mundane detail like it’s important, like it’s keeping him on the edge of his seat and he can’t wait to hear what’s coming next. 

The attention is both unsettling and charming by turns, because JT knows his life hasn’t been anything particularly interesting but from the way Malcolm listens, you’d never know it. 

The cop isn’t entirely sure how to handle it, because he’s never seen the kid take an interest in someone outside of working a case, and it’s a new side of him. Another facet to the Rubik’s cube that is Malcolm Bright. 

Over the course of the night the profiler explains that Otis Basemore, Grezny’s old cellmate and the current target of their low-key surveillance, works for a machine shop in Bushwick and has kept his record clean for years. He’s shacked up out here with his long-term girlfriend and her kids, and he’s been a model citizen according to his parole officer. It’s not exactly a promising lead.

He doesn’t want to burst the profiler’s bubble so JT doesn’t bother pointing out that they’re probably wasting their time sitting out here. It feels superficially productive, like the illusion of normalcy, and they’re both willing to cling to it.

They’ve gotten good leads off less, to be fair. It’s just a long shot. 

But Malcolm has his spark of life back; he’s all rambling drive and poorly-contained enthusiasm. After weeks spent in the hospital, fighting his way back to them, it feels like the world is tipping back into balance again. 

By dawn the cop can’t even summon the strength to pretend he’s not exhausted. 

Bright holds himself together with practiced poise, and it isn’t until after JT drops him off at his loft and drives home that he remembers that he should have checked the kid’s injury. Despite knowing it was probably an intentional ruse, JT still feels guilty for forgetting, like he’s somehow failed. Promises himself that he’ll make up for it tonight. He won’t let Malcolm distract him with his facade of health and energy, no matter how persuasive he is.

Mostly, he isn’t sure how the hell Malcolm went from white as a sheet and bleeding all over himself, to looking like a magazine cover in a coat and tie in the space of a few hours. Convincing enough to stand up to scrutiny for an entire night.

He can’t help feeling a little impressed. 

It’s somewhere around seven in the morning when the cop fumbles his keys into the door and shuffles into his apartment like a zombie. He’s drained enough that the whole night feels like a dream. 

Against his better judgement he glances over to the shelf under the TV. Sees the black frame standing upright. Mikey smiling at him from behind the glass. 

“Dammit Bright,” JT mutters to himself as he walks over to it, snatches it up. He hesitates. Stares at the wall and grips it in both hands without dropping his eyes. 

He stands there blankly, wondering what the hell is wrong with him. Why he’s too stubborn to let things go when it’s time. 

And it’s time. It’s  _ been  _ time, long overdue and throwing up roadblocks in his life at every turn. Between the persistent avoidance and unhealthy coping mechanisms he’s been stuck in limbo for ages, and it took Bright crashing into his life, all blue eyes and sad smiles, to finally shake him out. To make him blink and wake up and wonder  _ what the hell am I doing? _

But he’s here now. For better or for worse, the cop knows deep down that Malcolm won’t be able to fall out of his life as easily as he came into it. More importantly, he really doesn’t think he wants him to. 

JT sets the frame down slowly. Lets it stand upright so the life he used to have can smile out at him through the glass. It feels like forgiveness. 

He kicks off his shoes, flops down onto the mattress, and goes out like a light.

For the first time in days, he sleeps. 

. 

  
  


JT wakes up feeling like a new man. He didn’t dream, doesn’t even remember passing out. Just comes back to himself with a snap, blinking at the rays of afternoon light stabbing into his eyes through the curtain. 

He takes a long-overdue shower and throws the clothes he fell asleep in into the washer, trying to adjust to the surreal feeling of having slept most of the day away. Scarfs down a second bowl of cereal because the first one didn’t do the trick, not when he hasn’t had a real meal since yesterday.

It takes too long to remember he should probably check his phone. 

Sixteen text messages from Bright.

Incredulous and wondering if he maybe read that number wrong, JT thumbs open his messages and starts scrolling. 

_ Grezny bused tables at a bar and grill for a few months last year. We could try going there and talking up the staff. _

_ Bar’s closed now. Ignore previous message. _

_ Have you ever been horseback riding? Me neither. Sounds exciting. _

_ Look, I found Otis’ Facebook profile. (Attachment: 1 Image) _

_ God he’s boring. Why do people post pictures of their food? _

_ Are you sleeping? You’re probably sleeping. _

Shaking his head, JT muddles through another dozen or so messages. They’re mostly case-related, interspersed with bizarre non-sequiturs about unrelated topics. At least he hopes they’re unrelated; it’s hard to tell.

From the timestamps, it’s clear Bright didn’t sleep much. Or at all.

_ Eat something. _ JT types back with a heavy sigh.  _ And go to sleep.  _

Almost as soon as he pockets his phone it goes off again.

_ Already slept. Too much work to do. _

“Liar,” JT mutters out loud. 

He tosses his phone onto the couch and sits down at his desk, clearing away the clutter to open up his dusty laptop. 

He types up a strongly-worded email to the district attorney, making it clear he wants to give a victim’s impact statement at Grezny’s arraignment. Reiterates his distaste for the offer of a plea deal. It feels all wrong, knowing he’s listed under the  _ victim _ column in an emotionless report somewhere with a case number attached, knowing Malcolm’s name is on it too. 

At this point he’s not sure what else he can do, but he’ll be damned if he won’t fight this until his dying breath. 

JT fills the rest of his day with busy work. Goes to the gym for the first time in months. Hits the grocery store and restocks his dwindling fridge, grabs a case of energy drinks because at the rate Malcolm’s going he has a feeling he’s going to need them. 

The kid blows up his phone, and he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that JT’s replies are short or nonexistent. 

It doesn’t irritate him, per se. It’s just strange. Takes some getting used to. He’s not used to having someone so wrapped up in his life like this and it takes him by surprise every time he lets his mind wander. 

JT is half-asleep on his couch and the 10 o’clock news is a pleasant hum in the background when he receives the text that he’s been suspiciously waiting for all day.

_ So what time are you picking me up? _

**.**

It becomes a routine. 

It’s been three nights of… whatever the hell they’re doing, because it’s sure not  _ work _ . Parking on an empty street and having weird conversations in the middle of the night. JT eating gas station food, Malcolm flipping through the radio channels like a child with ADD. 

A whole lot of absolutely nothing happens at the trailer in question. Sometimes they catch glimpses of one of the kids that lives there or a short blonde woman who inevitably appears to screech at them and shoo them inside. So far no sign of Otis, which is discouraging.

Their persistent avoidance of whatever’s hanging between them is starting to grate on the cop’s nerves, wearing down both his sanity and his patience.

It’s somewhere around dawn on day three, and JT is driving the now-familiar route back to Bright’s place to leave him on the sidewalk and part ways.

He’s been working up the nerve to bring it up all night, and he tells himself the difficult part is less the subject at hand and more that pride he has to swallow to address it head-on. 

“Okay, fine.” He drops his hand onto his thigh, and it’s a little louder than he meant for it to be in the small space. “You win.”

The kid blinks at him, and he’s either clueless what JT’s talking about or he’s giving an Oscar-worthy performance to that effect. “While I do enjoy winning—who doesn’t?—what exactly are we talking about?”

The cop scowls and tries to focus on the road. “ _ Apparently _ , not much. That was the whole point wasn’t it?”

Without even seeing his face, JT can hear the kid’s brain whirring and grinding like an overclocked engine. His silence is enough to indicate he’s figured it out by now.

If Malcolm makes him spell it out, JT thinks his head might actually explode.

“Did you… want to talk about it?” The profiler asks eventually.

“I don’t fucking know. Don’t you?”   
  


“I’m not trying to avoid it.” 

That’s such a blatant lie that the cop can’t resist scoffing out loud. “Well, neither am I.”

“Good,” Malcolm breathes out, nodding, and by the way he’s running his hands up and down the hem of his coat, JT can tell he’s nervous. 

“Good,” he says back, and it all hits a brick wall there.

They sit in silence as the city flashes by around them, dawn cracking through the buildings like light through window blinds. 

By the time he pulls up the curb in front of Malcolm’s place, JT still hasn’t come up with the right words to say. Still can’t think of anything as he watches the profiler stuff his gear into his bag and step out onto the sidewalk. 

“Good talk,” Malcolm leaves him with a blinding smile, shutting the car door and bouncing across the pavement to head inside.

JT sits there for a long moment, flummoxed into silence. For the life of him he can’t wrap his head around that stilting, painfully awkward non-conversation and what it means. They made it as far as bringing up the elephant in the room, and everything came screeching to a halt. 

Like they hadn’t ever planned on making it this far and had no idea how to handle it.

Frustrated, JT throws the shifter into gear and pulls out into the street, thinking he might get a clearer sense of direction after he’s slept.

He’s halfway home before he realizes that yet again, Bright managed to dodge his intended first aid checkup. 

.

It’s night four. 

JT sits with a styrofoam clamshell on his knees, eating a greasy gas-station pizza he’s definitely going to regret later, and listens to Bright talk about the forensic science of tire tread and transference. Or something. 

It’s all started to blend together by now, and it’s easy. Easy to let Malcolm play on an endless loop and sit in each other’s company like they’ve known each other for years. 

Easy to forget that they’re both chasing ghosts when they know better.

JT strong-armed the kid into letting him check his stitches before they set out, begrudgingly admits they’re looking a little better. As usual, neither of them made any further mention of what happened between them a few days ago, or their sad attempt to almost address it. He’s thinking that’s starting to become a pattern.

Bright cuts off in the middle of a sentence and it takes the cop a second or two to notice, to shoot him a questioning look at his sudden silence.

“Look—” Malcolm leans forward to peer through the windshield.

JT follows his gaze, squinting in the dark at the tall, lanky figure that slumps down the trailer steps. He’s carrying a trash bag, presumably out to the cans on the curb. Even through the glass they can hear a woman’s voice from inside screaming after him, the screen door falling shut to muffle the noise.

“That’s him.” Bright’s eyes light up with a glint that the cop isn’t sure he likes. “I knew he was here. Come on, let’s go talk to him.”

“What? No,  _ no—!” _ JT’s grasping hand isn’t quick enough to catch Malcolm’s sleeve as the profiler pops open his door and jumps out of the car. 

Their suspect has already deposited his trash bags and seems to be lingering outside, wandering over to the mailbox. From the storm brewing in the trailer behind him, it’s doubtful he’s eager to go back inside anytime soon. 

“Otis!” Malcolm walks briskly across the street, all blind confidence and determination. “Otis Basemore?”

“Shit,” JT swears aloud, throwing his food into the backseat and scrambling out of the Jeep as quickly as he can manage. He shoves his keys in his pockets and follows, half-jogging to keep up with Bright before the kid can talk himself into danger.

“Yeah, and who are you?” Otis eyes them warily, shutting his mailbox with a nervous glance between the two men.

“NYPD,” Bright says, whipping a badge out of his coat and tucking it away again before Otis can really get a good look at it.

JT just about breaks his neck at the sight of the badge, because Malcolm was never issued one and he can tell from the brief glimpse that it’s not the right size or shape to be an NYPD Shield in the first place.

Glaring at his oblivious partner—using the term loosely—JT pulls his jacket aside to reveal his own badge where it’s clipped to his belt. 

“Detective Tarmel,” JT introduces himself, wondering why he’s jumping in to save the kid from his own mess. Again. “And uh… I guess that’s Bright.”

“We need to ask you some questions about your old cellmate, David Grezny,” Malcolm charges full speed ahead. “I assume you’ve been watching the news.”

“Ah, shit,” Otis grumbles, rubbing his forehead with one hand, his shoulders slumping. “Yeah, I caught wind’a that.”

“Would you prefer to talk inside?”

JT’s not a profiler but he can definitely recognize the oldest trick in the book:  _ don’t make me embarrass you on your front lawn, let’s go inside where you’re comfortable; where I can snoop around in your space. _

Otis grimaces over his shoulder towards the house, where an enraged voice can still be faintly heard ranting and raving. “Better not,” he says reluctantly. “Let’s just get it over with, alright? I ain’t talked to the guy in years. I been stayin’ clean.”

“That’s what your PO told us too,” Bright lies easily, pasting on a disarming smile as he rocks on his heels. “But you know how it is, we have to do our due diligence. Paperwork and all that. You understand.”

“Yeah of course,” Otis nods a little too quickly. He’s still nervous but starting to relax. “Shit sucks.”

“Right?” Malcolm is staying flippant and conversational, his eyes constantly moving, taking in every shift of weight and microexpression. That big brain humming like a supercomputer.

JT crosses his arms and stays right where he’s at, raising an eyebrow at Malcolm. He doesn’t have the first clue what the kid’s plan is, but he’s willing to keep an eye on him as he lets it all play out. 

“Well, I guess we’ll just jump right into it then,” Bright buzzes on. “I don’t suppose you’ve been helping Grezny out? Maybe, say, buying material components for homemade bombs designed to kill hundreds of people?”   
  


“What?” Otis’ eyes go wide, a flash of panic flickering across his face. “O-of course not, why would I do that? That’s insane!”

“That  _ is _ insane.” Malcolm waves a finger at him and tilts his head. “But then again, so is Grezny.”

“Yeah, the guy’s nuts,” Otis plows on, seemingly encouraged. “He was always talkin’ about crazy shit. I tried not to get too close to him y’know?” 

“What kind of crazy shit?” JT feels the need to interject, to redivert the wandering trail of thought.

Otis licks his lips, looking between Malcolm and JT for a moment. The cop raises an eyebrow, a silent warning to keep talking. 

“He would get… obsessed with things, like in a weird way.”

JT shoots a pointed glance at Malcolm. “Sounds like somebody else I know.”

Bright pretends not to notice. “Can you elaborate on that?”

“It could be anything. Sometimes a book, or something he saw on television. Or people. One time he liked the color of the ward nurse’s hair and he got so wound up about her, they had to transfer her out.”

Malcolm purses his lips thoughtfully. “Interesting. That’s not in his file.”

“Probably wouldn’t be. The psych’s hated the guy, didn’t wanna see him much. Wouldn’t even let him in long enough to put a name on his crazy.”

“So the last time you saw Grezny, or heard from him in any way was…?” JT jumps in again, and it’s surreal to be talking about someone who tried to kill them a week ago. Someone they’re learning so much about  _ after  _ the fact.

“I don’t know, maybe six, seven years?”

“Do you know if he has anyone else in New York? Mention any friends or family members, someone he might trust?”

Otis laughs at that, his eyes still darting between them like he’s trying to figure out if they’re being serious. “You must’a never met the guy. He don’t trust nobody, man. He either hates you, or he’s obsessed with you, and you better hope it’s the first thing.” 

Bright is silent for a long time, just looking at Otis carefully. The moments stretch to the point of vague discomfort before the profiler seems satisfied, suddenly snapping out of it and breaking into a polite smile.

“Well, Mr. Basemore, you’ve been extremely helpful. We’d like to thank you for your time, on behalf of the NYPD, and uh… don’t hesitate to call us if you know... You remember anything else.”

Otis looks a little taken aback at the abrupt closure, but nods gratefully. “Oh. Yeah, of course, yeah. How do I reach you?”

Bright nods at JT, shrugging his head towards Otis like JT should be able to read minds here. “Can you, you know… give him a card?”

“I don’t have a card,” JT growls out of the corner of his mouth, “because I’m not at work, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right, you  _ did _ leave those at the precinct,” Malcolm answers a little overdramatically. “My bad. Okay, well, take down my number.”

And that’s how Malcolm wound up giving his personal phone number to a nervous ex-con who also happened to be a person of interest in a double homicide, as JT would tell the story later. 

In the moment, all he can do is stand there and play the part of supportive partner on an official case, and try not to let Malcolm make fools out of either of them. 

They cut Otis loose and the man is all too happy to scurry back inside, clearly preferring to face the devil he knows. The woman’s voice, which JT can only assume belongs to Otis’ girlfriend, is still screeching through the windows as they depart.

Fine by him, JT thinks. Personally, he has another fish to fry. 

Keeping a firm grip on Malcolm’s elbow, the cop all but drags the kid back to the car, his molars aching as he clenches his jaw shut. He shoves Bright against the back of the SUV, holds him there with one outstretched arm and a dark look.

“Detective,” Malcolm raises an eyebrow at him suggestively. “Not that I’m complaining, but we  _ are _ a bit exposed out here—”

JT closes the distance between them, crowding Malcolm’s space enough to get him to shut up. Blue eyes fix on him, wide and off-guard. The cop is close enough to smell him, to watch his throat work as the profiler swallows.

It’s darkly satisfying to see that Bright’s not only nervous, but aroused. It feels like revenge.

JT reaches inside Malcolm’s jacket before the kid can stop him and yanks out the fake badge. It’s gold and made of obnoxiously shiny plastic.

“ _ Junior Fire Chief _ ,” he reads off incredulously, glaring at Malcolm as he steps back. “What the hell, Bright?”

“I know. Convincing, right?”

“It’s plastic.”

Malcolm smiles sheepishly, his shoulders pulling up into an apologetic shrug. “It worked, didn’t it?”

The cop laughs humorlessly, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop being shocked by the kid’s ballsy nerve. “It worked because  _ mine _ is real.”

“Tomato, tom-ah-to.” Malcolm is still altogether too relaxed, like a child who doesn’t really understand why he’s being scolded.

“Jesus Christ...” JT stalks to the driver’s side door and opens it forcefully, slides in and doesn’t wait to see if Bright follows.

“I’m not getting that back, am I?” Bright’s still all breathless excitement as he quickly follows, probably not wanting to give JT the chance to leave without him. 

The cop can’t pretend he isn’t tempted to do just that. It would serve the kid right. 

“Fuck. No.”

“That’s fair.”

JT drives them back to Bright’s, and it’s still early—not even midnight—but there doesn’t seem to be much point trying to spy on Basemore when they’ve essentially announced their presence. 

Malcolm is riding the roller-coaster high of success, postulating wildly about what little information they gleaned, and the cop doesn’t have the heart to point out that the whole thing was a bust. That Basemore was probably being honest about staying out of Grezny’s mess, and what little insight he did provide was essentially vague and unhelpful.

But he lets Malcolm ramble, because he seems happy, and JT’s not going to be the one to take that away from him. 

“So what’s next?” The cop finally asks as he puts the car in park.

“I have a few ideas in mind,” Malcolm says, and it takes a beat too long for JT to catch the note of mischief in his voice.

He does a double-take, giving the kid a once-over out of the corner of his eye. Surely he’s imagining it. There’s no way Malcolm is going from completely avoiding the subject to subtly flirting with him. Or so he tells himself.

“Do you want to come upstairs?”

Okay, now that’s a little more difficult to misread.

Malcolm still sounds breathless and half-drunk on chasing a case, that wide smile stuck on his face like he can’t wipe it off. There’s something a little unsure in his voice, too, and the way his eyes dart to JT’s through his eyelashes, the cop thinks he has an idea what he’s really asking.

“Sure,” he finds himself saying, his pulse quickening at the way Bright looks at him. This is... unexpected. He’s trying to think of an excuse to say no. Asking himself why he didn’t say it right away. 

He should be scolding the profiler for his stupid plan to impersonate a cop. Should be calling it a night and heading back to his own place to watch the Giants game on TiVo. He should be doing literally anything else right now, thinking about anything else. 

Instead he locks his car and follows Bright inside, wondering what the hell he just got himself into. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goddamn, these boys are dumb. Like I know what's happening next and I'm still frustrated...
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who's still reading, you have a rollercoaster ride ahead of you. Your feedback means the world to me, honestly.
> 
> Thanks to my lovely beta @eringeosphere for being infinitely patient and helpful like the angel she is.
> 
> If you haven't checked out "A Shot in the Dark" yet, brace yourself for some brutal torture!whump and go read it: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22110463
> 
> Also! For anyone who's not already there, come visit your authors!
> 
> Brimel Discord Server:   
https://discord.gg/K6tqRws
> 
> prodigal son trash server:  
https://discord.gg/fDpyMQc


	13. Chapter Thirteen

JT follows Malcolm inside, up the stairs in the near-pitch darkness. Keeping a respectful distance and feeling out his way with one hand on the guardrail, and _ holy shit what the hell is he doing? _

He wants to find a way to hit the brakes; bring the world to a screeching halt around him so he can just sit there for a minute and work through his options. Weigh the pros and cons. Maybe talk some sense into his own head because he’s _ sliding, _ letting Malcolm’s hypnotizing chaos drag him into all sorts of messes he’s not prepared for in the slightest. Somehow he knows it’s happening and still can’t find anything to grab onto to stop his fall. 

Or maybe he doesn’t want to. 

Maybe, for once, he just wants to say _ fuck it, _and let go, and see what happens. If maybe it’ll be good and right and make him feel alive again. 

“Can I blow you?”

JT stumbles, misses a step and nearly eats it on the stairs. He’s holding onto the railing a little too tightly and forces himself to relax his grip. 

The profiler says shit like that on purpose and JT knows it, but that knowledge doesn’t keep every nerve in his body from lighting up like a christmas tree. He takes a beat to collect himself, and stares up at Bright incredulously.

Malcolm’s half-turned to look back at him with a smile, and his eyes are glowing in the darkness. 

JT isn’t sure what he’s seeing anymore when he looks into those shining blue orbs. Mischief and madness and deeper emotions he doesn’t have a way to name. Sometimes there’s a glimpse of something dark, too. Like fear, only that’s too simple a word for it. 

Other times, like now, it’s something warmer. Fond and affectionate and below that, a glimmer of something infinitely sad.

He’s not a profiler. He doesn’t know what it all means. He can’t open up that brain like an old suitcase and start unpacking the layers, inspecting history and pain and hope. Malcolm’s a curveball wrapped in contradictions, the kind of impossible force he can’t prepare for no matter how hard he tries.

“Maybe let’s… get inside first,” he finally manages to say, and his voice is low and hoarse like it’s stuck in his throat.

There are sirens going off in his head, but there are enough other things happening too that the screaming alarm bells are almost drowned out. 

He wants this. He can’t even deny that anymore, and god knows he’s tried. For weeks, maybe longer. His body figured it out a long time before his head did, which isn’t all that surprising.

So why does he feel like he’s doing something wrong?

As it turns out he’s saved the difficulty of sorting out an answer, because they walk into Malcolm’s apartment and the lights are already on. 

Jessica is standing in the kitchen, making tea.

“There you are, darling. I made you a cup.” She turns around, a mug in each hand, and blinks twice when she catches sight of JT. “But I can always make a third?” 

“Good evening, mother.” In his defense, Malcolm takes the unexpected presence in stride. He approaches the kitchen island and takes the mug she passes across to him. “I wasn’t expecting you... Tonight, specifically.”

JT wishes the floor would open up and swallow him on the spot. He feels as if his wandering thoughts are on full display, scrolling across a glowing billboard over his head. 

“You have company.” A statement, not a question. Jessica eyes the cop as she takes a sip.

“Oh, yes. You remember Detective Tarmel. We’re working on a case.” 

JT is unbelievably grateful that Bright is a better liar than he is. 

“Oh? At midnight? I thought you were on leave,” she says, missing nothing. There’s a note of disapproval heavy in her voice. 

Bright smiles, and it’s the first sign of nerves he’s shown as he lets out a breathless laugh. “Well, _ leave _ isn’t exactly the word for it. It’s more of an extended vacation, taking some time to recover. Relax.”

“You know I did find it odd that your medical paperwork had a _ partner _ listed as an emergency contact,” Jessica breezes on with casual indifference. “If I didn’t know the context I’d have sworn that meant something else.”

Jessica laughs at the absurdity of that suggestion; Malcolm laughs with her. 

JT makes a face and struggles to stay calm.

He might be overreacting, but he immediately tells himself _ no _, he actually isn’t overreacting in the slightest. Maybe he’s even under-reacting.

He just barged into Malcolm’s apartment after it was heavily implied they both planned to get up to some extremely adult activities, only to find _ his goddamn mother _ standing there like she owns the place. 

All things considered, he figures he has every right to be losing his mind right now. 

“I think I left my phone in the car,” he blurts out to nobody in particular, patting his jacket pockets awkwardly to sell the bad lie. Without waiting for a response, he turns on his heel and rushes back downstairs. Sucks in cold air once he finds himself standing on the pavement. 

For a single irrational moment, he thinks about getting in his car and driving home. Escaping all this nonsense. For all he knows this was the universe intervening on his behalf, throwing a wrench into what was bound to be a very bad idea in the first place.

Somehow, he knows if he disappears now, it will not only look infinitely more suspicious—hell, they’re just here to work on a case, right?—but he doesn’t like the idea of doing that to Malcolm. Implying that it doesn’t mean anything. That Bright doesn’t.

Instead the cop stands on the sidewalk with his hands on his hips and stares at the city skyline, at the flickering lights reflecting in windows far overhead. 

“Fuck. My life used to be simple,” he mutters aloud, watching his breath drift away like cigarette smoke in the chilled air. 

The minutes tick by and eventually it reaches the point where he can’t stall any longer. He curses and turns around, heads back inside and climbs the stairs with a little less optimism than he had fifteen minutes ago. 

Back in the apartment, Jessica has her coat on and her purse on her arm, a sign she’s preparing to depart. The cop tries his best to look completely normal and not as relieved as he feels.

He averts his eyes as she pecks a kiss to Bright’s cheek, leaving her son with parting words in hushed tones. If he had to guess, her scolding fell on deaf ears. 

“I’ll leave your boys to your work,” Jessica says with a polite smile as her heels click towards the door. Her eyes linger on JT for a moment too long, or maybe he’s just being paranoid. 

“Goodnight Mrs. Whitly,” the cop says back, hoping it sounds polite and professional and casual. Everything he isn’t at the moment. 

She hums a non-committal response and lets herself out, leaving them standing alone in the tense silence as the door shuts. 

Malcolm is the first to speak, his lips quirking at the corners like he wants to laugh. “Your phone was in your pocket, wasn’t it?”

JT gives a half-hearted shrug, not bothering to lie. “How’d you know?”  
  


Bright tilts his head at him like the cop should know better than to ask. “Saw you from the window.”

“Shit.”

They stand there quietly for a moment. JT listens to the soft chirps and rustles coming from Sunshine’s cage in the corner, the distant rattle of old windows in the wind. 

“So…” Malcolm says at last, a hanging sentence with no real end.

“So.” JT repeats, hands in his pockets. He stares at the floor and sucks on his teeth, trying to figure out what to say next. 

“That kinda ruined the mood.”

“Just a bit.”

The cop still feels like a little kid with his hand caught in the proverbial cookie jar, and it’s ridiculous because they’re both grown adults and they haven’t even _ done _ anything. Not that they weren’t planning to. 

“So uh… Is she… you know. Like you?”

Malcolm gives him a puzzled look, and JT sighs heavily, unsure how to explain himself.

“With like, the reading people thing.”

“No.” Malcolm shakes his head, smiling as he heads into the kitchen. “She’s about as observant as anyone else, which is to say she’s selective."

The cop isn’t sure what to make of that exactly, but he notices Malcolm doesn’t seem all that bothered by the interruption so he figures he’ll take his word for it. 

He thinks maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Jessica showing up at the worst—or best—possible moment just to douse his clouded brain like a cold shower, reminding him of all the many reasons he needs to hit the brakes on this runaway train. 

Still standing right where he’s at, the cop watches Malcolm spread out the armful of files on the kitchen island, like he already snapped right back into work mode and he’s completely forgotten what brought them both here in the first place. 

Something’s wrong and he can’t shake it. Whether Malcolm’s avoiding something or hiding something or both, JT can’t get it out of his head.

Heaving out a long breath and rubbing his palms down the front of his jeans, he takes a decisive step forward. For better or worse, it’s time to face this thing head on.

“Okay. We’re gonna talk about this,” he says firmly, grimacing when Bright doesn’t even look up. He forges on. “It’s long overdue, so let’s just get this over with.”

“Talk about…?” A flash of distracted blue eyes.

“Stop it,” JT growls, pointing a warning finger in the profiler’s direction. “No more avoiding this shit.”

“I told you I wasn’t—”

“You lied.” It’s blunt, but true. “Fuck, so did I, I guess. Kinda.”

Malcolm finally has the good sense to look a little nervous. A clearer sign than any before that he was absolutely avoiding it, and was probably dreading this inevitable conversation just as much as JT was. 

“Well, that’s what I do,” the kid mumbles, frustrated, both hands coming up as the papers slide forgotten across the marble. “I lie, okay, and I _ avoid _ things.”

JT huffs, thinking that’s probably the most accurate thing he’s heard all week, and he doesn’t even hold it against him. If anything it’s progress. 

A crack; a step in prying open the floodgates. Even if it might drown them both.

“You talk my ear off all week. Don’t tell me you ain’t got something to say now.” An ultimatum and an opening. Because he knows how to get people to talk, he knows how to back people into a corner but he doesn’t have the first clue how to do that with Bright, who isn’t like anyone else he’s ever met. 

Malcolm takes his coat off in a rush of motion, like he’s thinking too hard and just now realized he was still wearing it. 

JT watches silently, wondering if he should bother taking his off too or if Malcolm’s about to kick him out. He figures this could go either way. 

The profiler finally cracks, folding his coat deliberately over the back of the barstool in front of him, running a hand through his hair like a nervous tic. “You kiss me, and then you just… stop?” 

“Yeah.” JT can’t believe he even has to say it out loud, his eyebrows raised in disbelief. “Cause you started bleedin’ all over the hardwood, dumbass.”

Malcolm looks immeasurably frustrated. “Okay, I know. But what if I hadn’t?”

“Well I figure we’d be having a different conversation right about now,” the cop sighs. 

The idea of having the theoretical, _ what if _ discussion isn’t exactly thrilling to him, but he can tell it’s been bugging the kid so maybe they need to. 

“You’d be telling me how this was all a mistake and I should just forget it ever happened,” Malcolm says quietly, staring at the countertop. His hands are folded over his coat, over the back of the stool, clenched and white.

The cop stares at him, wondering if he completely misheard those quiet words. As usual he can’t even attempt to track Malcolm’s thought process; can’t fathom how they went from _ blowjobs _ to _ mistakes _ this fast.

“No.” When he finally collects himself enough to respond, JT tries to make it sound firm enough to make Malcolm believe it. He’s not sure if it works, and he’s not sure if anything works anymore. He’s running in place, grasping at straws. 

“A mistake…” he repeats incredulously, trying to turn it over in his brain and find a way to make it all make sense. It doesn’t.

Malcolm’s jaw works, a little muscle clenching and unclenching in sharp relief under fluorescent lights. JT can almost hear him overthinking.

The more he thinks about it, the more it irritates him. Because the only two possibilities he can see are either that Bright is offering him an easy out, a chance to say _ yeah it was a mistake let’s never talk about it again..._

Or worse, he really believes it. Despite now being one of the people who knows him best on the planet, despite becoming that person almost overnight… maybe Bright really thinks that little of him. Gives him that little credit, and it’s maddening that the profiler’s massive brain could be so goddamn _ wrong_. 

He growls aloud at that thought, bringing his hands up in a useless, frustrated motion. “Sometimes I swear I just wanna shake you. Why, in god’s name, would you _ think _ that?”

Malcolm just stands there, stubborn and infuriating and everything that JT both hates and loves about him. Of all the times for him to be silent, he’s definitely picked the worst possible one.

“Lemme clear this up.” The cop sighs, breathing carefully, trying to stay calm so at least one of them can claim rational thought here. He yanks his coat off, because with or without an invitation he’s staying. If only to make a point.

“First off, I kissed _ you _, and maybe the timing wasn’t great but—you know, I don’t regret it. I don’t.” He feels like he’s coming to the revelation even as the words come out, explaining things as much to himself as he is to Bright. “And it wasn’t a mistake. Not unless you tell me it was.”

The self-doubt creeps in, because he thought he had a handle on Malcolm’s feelings on this. The subtle, and occasionally not so subtle flirting, the too-blunt invitation on the stairs, the fact that the kid not only kissed him _ back _ but apparently had considered kissing him before. Body language and implications and everything left unsaid before this moment.

Now, he’s not so sure. 

Because Malcolm’s just standing there looking like a kicked puppy, avoiding eye contact, his tense shoulders screaming nerves and anxiety.

“Well?” JT prods, daring to step closer. Standing by the counter and facing the profiler, trying to understand what he’s thinking. Hoping he’s saying what he needs to, getting across what he needs to. Making sense of things that don’t.

“I don’t really do this,” is what Malcolm finally breathes, his breath shuddering like he held it in too long.

“Join the fucking club.” JT half-laughs, relieved at the brief response because it’s _ something _, it’s better than silence and uncertainty. “Might come as a shock here, but I ain’t exactly the type to just kiss people. I don’t exactly... you know, date, or sleep around, or any of that.”

It’s stilted and uncomfortable to say aloud, but the truth is he hasn’t so much as _ tried _, not with anyone, not in years. He shut down the part of himself with the capacity to feel, or so he thought. He’d been so sure he had it all on lock. Control and isolation and safe distance, the things he needed to protect himself. Keeping everyone at arm’s length. Uncaring who it hurt because at least it didn’t hurt him.

And then, along came Malcolm. 

Along came this damn infuriating kid with the bluest eyes he’s ever seen and an uncanny knack for getting under his skin, and it all came crashing down. He has no idea how to say that. No idea how to communicate to Malcolm that this isn’t random or spontaneous even if it seems that way, that it _ means _ something.

“I don’t either,” Malcolm huffs, almost defensively. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Like I said, join the club.” JT shakes his head, fighting back a smile at the absurdity of the whole thing. “Guess we’re just a couple’a full-grown idiots figurin’ shit out as we go.”

“I don’t want you to feel like you owe me anything,” Malcolm says in a rush, like it was building up and finally became too much to hold in. “I don’t want guilt or pity or—”

“Hey,” JT interrupts quickly, because he’s not about to let Bright ride out that line of faulty reasoning without stepping in. “Just listen to me for a half a second, alright?” 

He licks his lips, shifts on his feet. Tries to tackle the impossible task of funneling sheer chaos down into logic. 

“Truth is, there might’a been a time when I would have done that shit. Run off, been a coward about it.” The cop isn’t sure if he’s really making the smartest choice here, but he owes the kid honesty at the very least. A duty he can’t shake since Malcolm admitted those simple words to him in this same apartment not all that long ago. 

_ You’ve never lied to me. _

He owes him that. 

Out of all the heavy things they’ve thrown out into the air between them, somehow _ that _ gets a reaction out of Malcolm. 

“You’re not a coward.” Bright says it like he knows that. Like he’s pointing out that the sky is blue and he can’t imagine any other perspective because it would be _ wrong. _

“Yeah, well. I’ve done some cowardly shit in my time. Made some choices based on whatever was easiest, or safest. Run from things I shouldn’t have.”

When JT looks up again, because without even realizing it he was staring at the floor and zoning out, Bright’s watching him. He’s got that look in his eyes like he’s got a question; like he’s quietly saying things JT’s still too slow to catch.

“What changed?” Is what the profiler asks eventually. 

_ Why me, why now? _

JT thinks about dripping pipes filled with blood and the way concrete dust tastes in his mouth. Thinks about second chances and the way life doesn’t offer too many of those. About all the other second chances he’s spent the last ten years laying awake just wishing he’d had.

“I don’t know.”

He still isn’t sure how to say it in a way that doesn’t make him sound creepy or crazy or both, but if this really is his second chance, he knows for certain he’s not about to waste it. 

“And I don’t know what this is, I ain’t even got the first clue.” JT drops the jacket he’s still holding onto the stool next to Bright’s, spends a little too long smoothing over the corners and missing the way leather used to feel. “Believe me kid, I’m as lost as you are. But whatever it is, I ain’t tapping out. Just… just know that.”

“Me neither.” Again it’s almost too quiet to pick up, a little more unsure than JT is comfortable with. But the hard glint in the profiler’s eyes isn’t as he finally looks up, makes eye contact like a promise.

“Good,” JT nods, sighing. It feels like he just ran a marathon, and he’s full of adrenaline because he wasn’t sure how this would go. Didn’t even have a way to make a good guess. He was just jumping in and hoping for the best. 

Maybe the kid’s been rubbing off on him after all.

“What now?” Malcolm’s voice is a little stronger, a little more confident. 

“Now…” The cop trails off, casting his eyes around the dim space like he can find an answer waiting for him. “Now, we work on the case. We do whatever we can.”

A plan is good. A plan gives him direction, confidence and drive and a framework to stick to when everything else falls apart.

Malcolm nods, looking as relieved as JT feels. The cop hates that they both got so worked up over this; hates that it was enough to drive them half-crazy trying to guess what the other was thinking. 

“I, uh… I have some ideas.” The profiler visibly pulls himself together, standing up a little straighter, his hand making several more passes through messy hair. “Leads we might have missed before.”

“Great,” JT retorts flatly. “But first, we got some housekeeping to do. You’re still favoring your side, don’t think I missed it.”

Bright looks a little guilty at the observation but doesn’t argue. It’s sign enough that he’s still in pain and hiding it like a pro.

It’s hard to look at Malcolm now and remember that under the mask he’s just a walking mess of blood and bandages, because he holds it together well. Puts up a facade that’s entirely too convincing by design. 

JT almost didn’t catch it. He might not have if he wasn’t paying attention, because at some point Malcolm became the most important thing in his orbit and he’s zeroed in on every step, every shift of weight and line of his face. Studying Malcolm like the kid studies his files, always hunting for hidden secrets. He doesn’t think he’s ever paid such close attention to someone in his life.

Like it’s an old habit, Malcolm takes his place on the couch while JT goes for the first aid kit. Lifts his shirt and grinds his teeth and lets the cop peel away the bandages to reveal the mess underneath. 

JT works in silence, forcing himself to study the healing sutures with a clinical eye. And the wound looks better, objectively speaking. Healing, Bright’s overtaxed body doing what it was designed to do, albeit slowly. 

The fact that he has to work so hard to stay detached is still new to him. Concerning, indicative of all the ways Bright’s wormed under his skin and made a home there. He should be terrified, he thinks, and maybe he is. 

“You know it bothers me too,” Malcolm volunteers into the warm silence.

JT looks up at him briefly, traces distant eyes under dark lashes, staring blankly into the middle distance like he’s miles away. 

He doesn’t ask what Malcolm means. He knows.

“You dream about it?” He finds the courage to ask, focusing on his hands as he dabs antiseptic across the ugly black stitches. 

“I dream about a lot of things.” A loaded statement. “But… lately, yeah.”

JT purses his lips, breathing out through his nose to keep his hand steady as he applied fresh gauze and tape. “You figure out anything that helps?”

“No,” Malcolm sighs, then tips his head like he’s reconsidering. “Maybe.”

His eyes flicker over to the cop, away again quickly.

“What?” JT straightens up, giving Bright his full attention because it feels important.

Malcolm looks at him, his eyes clouded with emotion and nerves. His voice is a rough whisper. 

“You know that feeling… like your skin hurts and you wanna rip it off. Like everything’s broken and you just… you just want it to _ stop _. Like you might crack or scream or just disappear because it’s all wrong and you just—need a break. Anything to get some peace.”

JT swallows hard. Something heavy catches in his throat as he looks Malcolm right in the eye. 

“That’s the one,” he manages to say, and it sounds like someone else’s voice. Someone who isn’t perfect or whole or strong, not in the slightest. A broken man.

“I don’t feel like that around you,” Bright says simply. Chin turned down, blue eyes hidden. 

Something in JT’s head clicks. Another little piece of the Rubik’s cube twisting into perfect pattern.

It’s like Malcolm just pulled back a curtain and explained _ everything. _ Gave him a rare glimpse into a deeper truth, into the brutal and twisted heart of things. The evasive honesty he’s been hunting for this whole time. 

It makes so much sense that he thinks he really should have seen it before now. He should have put two and two together but he was too busy wrestling with his own brain. He’s managed to brush it with his fingertips and feel it slip away so many times, but now it’s here, in the palm of his hand. Ugly and raw and tangible.

Malcolm’s strange attachment to him ever since he first woke up in the hospital, his reaction to seeing JT show up every morning with that damn coffee and food he’d never eat. The texts and messages and stakeouts. 

Finding any and every excuse to share the same space. The same thing JT’s been doing.

And here the cop had felt so guilty, like he was indulging, somehow using Malcolm to relax the tension in his muscles, to fill the gaping hole in his chest. Soothing his own traumas and anxiety and mindless paranoia. 

Somehow failing to recognize that he was having the exact same effect on Bright. 

“Me too, kid,” he says roughly, staring at the colored array of bruises under his hands. He smooths his fingers over his work, dark skin against white bandages.

He hopes they’re more than that. More than a bandaid on each other’s wounds. 

Malcolm’s not a soldier, not even a cop, and JT’s never in his life felt like this about somebody who wasn’t either of those things. That sense of brotherhood and loyalty and something deeper still. He knows himself well enough to know that when the smoke clears, he’s still going to feel the same way, come hell or high water. Because he doesn’t latch onto people easy but when he does, it’s for good. It’s real. It’s who he is.

“Meds?” He asks, clearing his throat because this shit is heavy and he didn’t expect to get hit this hard. To feel everything so deeply in a self-imposed world of not feeling _ anything. _

“Already took ‘em.” Malcolm doesn’t seem bothered by the segue, probably because he already switches gears like a manual transmission in rush hour traffic. 

JT raises a skeptical eyebrow, but doesn’t push it as he repacks the first aid kit. It’s becoming familiar. 

“You’re not going to stay, are you.” Malcolm tugs his shirt down, shifting on the couch. It’s a question but it’s not. It’s defeat, like he’s shoring up for a crushing disappointment.

JT thinks he probably _ should _ leave. Give them both a few hours to sort through the mess they made, words that came out awkward and strange and full of too much meaning. 

Instead he looks at Bright and thinks again about the way it feels when you’re hurting and sleepless, dying slowly inside your brain. Ready to rip yourself to shreds for even a heartbeat of relief. 

“I’ll stay,” he caves, and it’s easy. So much easier than it should be. In a way, he’s glad Malcolm asked, glad he trusts him enough to ask. Even if it’s in his own roundabout way. 

Surprise and relief chase each other across Malcolm’s face while the cop watches, and if his heart flutters a little at the sight, well. Nobody has to be the wiser. 

“On the couch,” he clarifies firmly, leaving no room for argument. “Whatever else we got goin’ on, we focus on the case first. We’ll figure out the rest... Just not tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO SORRY. I know I skipped a week without warning because, well, writer's block hit me like a ton of bricks. Between hectic work/gym/dumb-real-life-stuff and trying to write in every free moment, I definitely burned myself out pretty hard. 
> 
> This chapter hasn't been Beta'd yet so... read at your own risk, it's a mess. 
> 
> Also, rest assured the action will pick up again soon. Next chapter if all goes well. 
> 
> Thanks to those of you who have stuck around and checked in on me, you're freaking amazing. I love you all. <3


	14. Chapter Fourteen

Neither of them have held down a steady sleep schedule in days, so it’s close to 4 AM by the time JT finally taps out and retreats to the couch. Malcolm murmurs a quiet _ goodnight _, like he’s not sure what else he’s meant to say, and goes to bed. 

JT listens to him strap himself into leather restraints like some kind of prisoner in a mental ward, and feels his chest tighten. He decides to be glad the profiler is trying to sleep at all. He was half expecting the kid to spend the night—or morning, whatever time it is now— up and working. 

He figures he’s going to have to get used to being wrong, because tonight it’s almost too easy to convince him to rest. Whether that has anything to do with the cop’s presence, or is just the cumulative effect of so many sleepless nights is anybody’s guess.

Flopping down on the couch in the dark, he lays there. Listening to Bright breathe across the room like every nerve and atom in the cop’s body is spinning, magnetically drawn like a compass seeking true north. That’s Malcolm, now. 

Somehow, defying odds and logic, the profiler became his anchor. It wasn’t something he chose, or something he was aware of while it was happening. Another human being crashing into his life, rewriting his code, reminding him that there was a time—a long time ago—when he first discovered that he had it in him to care this much about another person. That he’s somehow found it again, years later. Cracking through cold stone and age-old defenses like they didn’t even exist.

He can’t stop replaying simple words, simple moments in his head. Malcolm’s overt proposition on the staircase a few hours ago. The kiss they shared, a day ago or a lifetime. It’s getting hard to keep track of time. 

Even knowing how much he’s overthinking it, how he’s turning it over and over in his brain until something simple becomes too complex, he can’t stop himself. He’s desperately, achingly terrified. 

He’s scared that Malcolm is confused. Reaching, projecting. Turning whatever strange comfort they’ve managed to find in each other into something it’s not. The elusive sexual undertone that’s blossomed between them like a brushfire is what Malcolm’s offering because he thinks it’s what the cop wants. What the kid thinks he needs to give away to keep JT in his space, a trade born of necessity and practicality and not anything deeper than that.

It would kill him if that was true, he realizes. It hurts to even think. 

And maybe he’s not giving the profiler enough credit: to know what he wants, to be honest, to make his own choices. But everything he knows, everything he’s learned about the kid over the course of their strange relationship is _ screaming _at him. Reminding him that Malcolm doesn’t have a great track record of making good judgement calls, or doing what’s healthiest for himself. 

That should irritate him. It used to. Now it just makes everything worse. Pushes that big red button in his head that says _ protect, fight, care _. Activating the core of who he is and what he’s always been, what he’s always needed and been drawn to. It’s in his blood, stronger than stone. In his head, a persistent whisper of instinct. 

If Malcolm needs him here, he’ll stay. But he’ll be damned if he’s going to be anything more than that, more than a comforting presence, until he’s sure.

Somewhere in the pitch black silence, he hears Bright jerk in his sleep. Leather and metal clattering. The sound of a body twisting against the blankets.

JT turns onto his side and punches the borrowed pillow into a comfortable shape under his head. Forces himself to ignore it. 

Christ, the damn pillow even smells like Malcolm. It doesn’t help. He drifts in the scent and feels guilty that it relaxes him, that it loosens up the coiled muscles in every limb and slows his heartbeat like it’s something familiar. Something he’s known all his life. 

It’s too much to wrap his head around, exhausted in the early hours of the morning. He lets his face fall into the pillow, into a scent that’s already seeping into his bloodstream, crawling into his head, altering his DNA. Turning him into someone who lays awake and worries about things he can’t control.

Restless and troubled, he sleeps.

**.**

JT drops his spoon into his coffee mug with a muted clink and stirs.

Malcolm is chattering about… something. Sitting across from him in a booth at the cramped diner JT dragged them to when they woke up around noon. An old haunt from his days on patrol where the coffee is strong and the food greasy. Noisy fabric stretches, faded across the seat backs, while the kind of tacky art you couldn’t give away litters the crowded walls. The entire place is trying to go for some kind of 40’s vibe, but it just comes off like the 90’s ugly leftovers. 

As gaudy as it is, it’s one of JT’s favorite spots in the city. 

“I slept for six hours,” Malcolm grins when the cop gets up the energy to ask him why he’s zinging like a wind-up toy. “That’s insane, I haven’t slept like that in… well, ages.”

“Uh-huh,” JT mutters, folding up the lamninated menu and sliding it to the edge of the table without reading it. 

“And um. How did you sleep?” It’s awkward small talk, Malcolm’s thin fingers fluttering over the edges of the files he insisted on bringing with them so they could _ multitask _ over breakfast.

“Fantastic,” the cop plasters on a smile, hoping it doesn’t sound too sarcastic. Because he’s not about to admit he laid awake half the night, listening to Bright toss and turn and pull at those damn restraints in his sleep. Overthinking and overfeeling.

Malcolm nods, and he’s right back to radiating all the nerves and uncertainty JT thought they managed to work through yesterday. 

He wants to tell the kid to relax, to take a deep breath and stop driving himself nuts but it feels hypocritical given the circumstances. Besides that, he doesn’t exactly know enough about whatever’s going through Malcolm’s head. Not enough to help, or do anything about it, so he chooses to keep his mouth shut for now.

Instead, he thinks about how he might be able to take it the other way. Refocus that bubbling energy on something productive. His eyes land on the case files.

“What’s our next move, Sherlock?” He nods his head at the paperwork, thinking he wouldn’t mind going twenty minutes without talking about the damn case, but he’s willing to bite the bullet if it distracts Bright. Even temporarily. 

Malcolm needs no further encouragement. 

“Okay, so. We have a couple options...” He dives in, shuffling out a stack of copied photos and laying them out in front of the cop. 

“I still think it’s worth tracking down Grezny’s former associates. We know that wherever the second killer is, whoever he is—it’s likely they met somewhere they might have connected on some level. Recognizing the radical ideologies in one another to form this relationship, or more likely a dependency.” 

At least distracting him worked, JT thinks, only half-paying attention. He’s still groggy and off-balance thanks to his wrecked sleep schedule, but he does his best to pay attention because it’s still important to Malcolm. 

Their waitress chooses that moment to appear with a decanter to fill their empty mugs. She does a visible double take at the graphic photos laid out on the table. 

JT clears his throat and stirs his fresh coffee. “Breakfast special,” he finally volunteers to break the tension.

“Got it. And what can I get for you, hon?” To her credit she recovers quickly, flipping open a dog-eared notepad as she smiles at Malcolm.

“Oh, I’m fine, thank you.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you’re going to eat something.” JT throws a pointed glare at the profiler. 

Malcolm presses his lips together and breathes out through his nose. Tosses a charming smile at the waitress. “Maybe some eggs?”

She raises an eyebrow at him like she’s still waiting for him to finish.

Malcolm’s eyes dart briefly to JT and back. “Scrambled?”

JT rolls his eyes. Of course Malcolm could take something as simple as ordering food and make it rocket science. He turns his attention to the confused waitress. 

“Just make it two specials.”

“Coming right up,” she mumbles, disappearing quickly. The cop can’t blame her.

“What do you have against breakfast food, exactly?” JT takes a long pull of his coffee, and it’s too strong and on the scalding side of warm, just how he likes it. 

“Nothing.” Malcolm’s half-hearted shrug isn’t exactly convincing. “I’m just not hungry.”

JT grunts skeptically. It’s not the hill to die on, he thinks. Not today. 

“So the second profile is tough, it’s generally difficult to differentiate one person’s signature from another in situations like this. But there are a few key points.”

Even Gil usually has mercy on them first thing in the morning, JT thinks dourly. Malcolm isn’t quite as easy with the transition, or maybe he just doesn’t have the social tact necessary to implement it.

“All identifying factors were removed. Teeth, finger joints. Look at this—”

Malcolm slides across the photo, or the black and white copy of it he made at some point. 

“An entire patch of skin has been cut out. Which means that it was an identifying mark, maybe a birthmark, or a scar? Or a tattoo.”

JT stares at the photos, at the wide swatch of skin peeled away from the spine in an asymmetrical rectangle pattern. 

“Grezny had a fresh tattoo.” 

Malcolm blinks at him. “He did?”

The cop shifts in his seat, palming his mug. He isn’t sure why he didn’t think of telling the kid that before. He assumed the profiler knew, because Malcolm seems to know everything and it’s easy to forget that he wasn’t there at the precinct. That he didn’t get much of a look at Grezny at the parking garage before… before it happened. 

“Yeah, on his hand.”

“How fresh?” Malcolm’s eyes light up, like it means something more to him than JT can see.

“I don’t know, maybe less than a week.” JT struggles to think back. “Like the edges were still kinda red and shit.”

“What did it look like?” Malcolm is staring at him so intently it’s bordering on uncomfortable.

“Shit, I don’t know,” JT grouches, shifting in his seat. “It was like a snake.”

He watches a glimmer of… something, indecipherable and vague, pass across the profiler’s eyes. 

“Just a regular snake?”  
  


“Kind of in a circle.” The cop watches Malcolm carefully, unable to shake his baseless suspicion. “Like it was biting onto its own tail.”

“Ouroboros,” Malcolm says quietly, leaning back in his seat. 

JT watches him silently, his coffee mug sitting forgotten. Maybe he’s going crazy, but he could swear it means something the kid. He could swear Bright’s trying to hide it, too. 

“You recognize it?” He asks eventually, playing dumb because there’s still something going on here he can’t quite pin down. 

“Uh, yeah.” Malcolm clears his throat, and something about the way he shifts just makes JT even more certain he’s right about this. “I think I saw it in an old textbook one time. Ancient Egyptian in origin; now it’s usually associated with alchemy. Kind of obscure.”

JT opens his mouth, quickly shuts it again. Thinks he should call the kid out on whatever bullshit he’s spewing and immediately realizes that he really doesn’t have anything to go off of here. Nothing concrete, just a nagging suspicion that all of this means _ something _. Paints a bigger picture than what he can see. 

He’s interrupted by the arrival of their food, generous plates of steaming breakfast food that instantly make his mouth water. The waitress gives a polite smile as she passes out the dishes, setting condiments in the middle of the table and making a point of avoiding looking at the scattered photos of mutilated corpses Malcolm didn’t have the foresight to hide. 

After she’s gone JT unwraps his silverware and eyes Malcolm, waiting for the profiler to reluctantly do the same.

“This is a lot of food,” Bright complains half-heartedly. 

“Yeah. Kinda the whole point.”

He waits for Malcolm to take a bite before he digs into his own, thinking his stomach might actually explode if he delays any longer.

They eat in silence, JT focusing on his food while he fights with his own instincts about Bright’s mysterious behavior, thinking he needs to have more than a hunch if he’s going to start an argument he probably won’t be able to finish. 

“This is actually really good,” Malcolm admits eventually around a mouthful of hashbrowns.

“Ain’t gotta act so surprised about it,” JT says to hide his smug satisfaction. “Told you this was the best diner in the city.”

He’s determined not to make a big deal about it, but he’s immeasurably relieved that the profiler is actually _ eating _, that it’s not a fight this time. And he doesn’t exactly clean his plate, but the kid makes a dent in the mountain of food in front of him and JT figures that’s a start.

“I know you’re probably getting tired of the all-nighters,” Bright volunteers as he pushes his plate away and wipes his lips on a napkin. “But I do have one more place for us to check tonight.”

“Don’t suppose it’s somewhere we could go… y’know, while normal people are awake?” JT doesn’t hold out much hope on that one. 

Bright shrugs apologetically. “It’s not exactly that kind of place.”

**.**

“You’re joking.”

JT thinks that it’s entirely possible he allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security here. Maybe that was intentional on Bright’s part; maybe he was just easing him into complacency with an entire week of uneventful nights spent eating junk food in the driver’s seat. 

Only to spring this shit on him. 

“Detective, don’t tell me you’ve never been into a strip club before.”

JT grimaces. “Only about a hundred. Hated ‘em all. Guess you know by now it ain’t exactly my scene.”

He glares at the bright pink neon and waiting crowds, wishing he was anywhere else on the planet right now. It takes a beat, but he does a double-take as Bright’s words sink in. 

“Wait, have _ you _?”

“Just once, ages ago.” Malcolm grins, peeling off his wool coat and loosening his tie. He’s wearing a pale gray button-up and slacks but even the slight adjustment manages to look obscene. “Cheers to brand new life experiences.”

And with that, the profiler pops the door open and hops out.

JT’s only option is to follow, which he does after another beat or two of sitting there feeling incredibly stupid. 

He trails behind the profiler, who cuts the line by passing a wad of cash to the bouncer. Like he was planning this all along. The burly man at the door drops the rope for them to enter, and when Bright waves him over impatiently the cop drags his feet.

He’s not going to let the kid out of his sight, that’s for damn sure. But he’s not going to pretend that he’s happy about this either. 

“What the fuck are we doing here, Bright?” He leans close to grumble as they slip through and enter the building through a dark hallway. The music is impossibly loud, rattling the walls with an obnoxious bass beat that seems about to drill into his skull.

“Just trust me on this one,” Malcolm yells back. It’s a dull sound in the cacophony, almost drowned out.

With that, they step into a massive room lit by flashing neon strobes and spinning disco balls. A throng of sparsely-clad bodies moves like some kind of bizarre nightmare, flashing in and out of focus under the lights. It looks more like an X-rated nightclub than an adult bar.

JT stares blankly.

There’s a massive stage in the middle of the room with three offset poles. Occupied by three very attractive, very _ male _ dancers.

“Oh, okay,” JT says aloud, not even caring if Bright is listening at this point. “It’s _ that _ kinda bar.”

“Don’t worry, I have a plan!” 

It’s the last thing the cop hears before Malcolm disappears into the crowd. JT doesn’t bother following. He’s going to stick out here like a sore thumb anyway, not to mention he’s completely clueless as to what the kid’s plan is this time. If he even has one.

Instead he makes his way to the bar lining the outside wall. Puts his back to the wood and waits, feeling like a stranger in his own skin. He watches Malcolm bob through the crowd, tracking the light-colored shirt that glows like a beacon under the blacklights. It’s luck or design that most of the other patrons are either completely topless, or wearing shades of black and leather.

JT’s never had the nerve to walk into a gay bar before; his strip club experiences have been strictly limited to tagging along with his fellow soldiers on leave. This isn’t like any of those places, and not just because the dancers aren’t women. It’s the kind of place that probably has a waiting list to get in. The booths are plush and spacious, the stage clean. The bar well-stocked and somehow expensive looking.

For all his awkwardness, it’s strange to realize that Bright doesn’t exactly look out of place here. Not with his shirt unbuttoned at the top, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, hair hanging loose in the humid air. 

The cop turns over his own paranoid curiosity, wondering if Bright really is as much of a stranger to this environment as he pretends to be.

“He’s pretty,” says the bartender from behind him.

JT scowls at him over his shoulder. The other man is leaning over the bar, all five’o clock shadow and exposed muscles. He’s wearing an obnoxious bow tie and little else.

The cop doesn’t like how the man is staring, doesn’t like the hungry look in his eyes. Doesn’t like the way everyone Malcolm walks by is giving him the exact same look, like sharks smelling fresh blood in the water.

“Hey bud, do me a favor?” JT mutters over his shoulder. “Fuck off.” 

The bartender laughs, but takes the hint and wanders away. 

JT narrows his eyes, watching Bright drift through the crowd with an awkward, dopey grin plastered on his face like he’s trying to fit in. It’s sort of working. Most of the other patrons are too drunk, too high, too distracted to care that he’s a stranger. The ones that do notice don’t seem to mind in the slightest.

A dark-haired man who’s entirely too attractive for comfort approaches Bright, tries to get him to dance. JT clenches his fist in his pocket and forces himself to stay put. He doesn’t have any right to interfere, and even if he did, he figures Bright is working. Hopefully.

“On the house,” says the voice JT told to fuck off a minute ago. “You look like you could use it.”

The cop turns, catches sight of a clear drink on a coaster as the bartender slides it over to him. 

He only hesitates for a beat before he takes it, nodding his thanks. If ever there was a good excuse for drinking on the job, he figures this is it. 

Malcolm is still standing uncomfortably close to someone who’s all but grinding on him, and now he has his phone out. Showing the stranger a photo, or something else JT can’t make out from his vantage point.

JT wasn’t expecting to feel jealous. He wasn’t expecting it to be this _ strong _.

Suddenly a little queasy, he takes a long swig of the mystery drink and grimaces at the taste of sugar and strong vodka. 

_ Beggars can’t be choosers. _

He finishes the awful concoction quickly, slaps the glass back down and finds he’s still feeling uncomfortable and frustrated. 

Paranoia is setting in, that gut-deep anxiety that reminds him there are too many possiblities, too many variables lurking in the unknown. Somebody he knows could see him here, could jump to all the wrong conclusions and ruin the carefully-constructed lie he’s spent years building around himself. He’s been so careful, so thorough. A single night in the wrong bar could bring that all crashing down around his ears.

It was less than a day ago that he reminded Bright he’s been a coward in his life. He thinks he still is one, after all. Thinks that he’s proving it in all the worst ways. 

Turning around to the bar so he doesn’t have to watch Malcolm flirt with handsome strangers, doesn’t have to deal with all the ugly, unpleasant emotions that brings up, JT flips out his wallet and throws cash down on the wooden bartop. 

“Maybe just a beer,” he qualifies at the devilish smile thrown his way.

“Whatever you want, big boy.” The bartender makes a point of looking him up and down.

The cop rolls his eyes and turns away stubbornly. He’s not in the mood to humor thirsty bar staff trolling for tips, and it’s the least of his concerns right now. More than anything, he just wants Malcolm to finish whatever the hell he’s up to so they can get out of here.

Naturally, it couldn’t possibly be that simple. Never is, because this is Bright they’re talking about.

Bright, who is suddenly nowhere in sight.

JT stands up straight, his eyes furtively moving through the teeming crowd. It would be easy to get lost here, in the mass of bodies and sweat. Too easy. 

There’s no need to overreact, he tells himself. No need to get worked up.

That resolve lasts right up to the point where he watches a door open on the other side of the room. Watches that dark-haired stranger usher Malcolm inside with a hand on the small of his back. 

Swearing to himself JT pushes forward, shoving and elbowing his way through the crowd as he makes a beeline for the door. The closed door. Behind which literally anything could be happening, has maybe already happened. Malcolm could be in danger, he could be getting himself in over his head, could be hurt—

JT throws the door open with a little more force than necessary, partially because he wasn’t expecting it to swing open so easily, but mostly because he’s already half-panicking.

There’s a well-lit office on the other side, standing in stark contrast to the dim shadows and flashing lights outside. Two pairs of startled eyes that dart to meet his.

“Are you okay?” JT hears himself ask dumbly, feeling more than a little breathless as he registers the complete lack of danger and wills his racing heartbeat to slow down.

“I’m fine,” Malcolm says with an amused quirk of his lips. Like he knows exactly what JT is thinking. Hell, maybe he does.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were with someone.” To his credit, the other man seems properly terrified, which isn’t surprising considering how angry JT is sure he looks right now. The stranger is holding up a thick three-ring binder, clutched to his chest like a shield in reaction to the sudden interruption.

Malcolm lets out a nervous laugh, throwing a look at the cop JT can’t decipher.

“This is my partner, Detective Tarmel,” the profiler explains. “Detective, Anthony _ works _ here. He was going to let me take a look through the employee files.” 

Malcolm raises an eyebrow, like he’s reminding the cop why they’re here in the first place.

“Oh. Right.” JT clears his throat, tugs at the edges of his jacket.

“When you say partner, do you mean—”

“So are these the files?” Bright interrupts quickly, stepping forward to pry the binder out of Anthonys hands. “Thank you _ so much _. You’ve been immensely helpful.”

Anthony laughs nervously, still eyeing JT like he thinks the cop might actually attack him at any moment. “Yeah, no problem. I’ll just, uh, be right outside. Come find me when you’re done.” And he has the nerve to _ wink _ at the profiler as he leaves.

Malcolm makes a face at JT once they’re alone, half-amused, half-impressed.

“You really got over here quick.” An unnecessary observation, more of a jab than anything else.

“I don’t like that guy,” JT mutters, infinitely glad his dark skin hides the flush that creeps up his cheeks. 

“What—you _ literally _ just met him.”

“It’s a whole vibe, okay?” JT lifts his hands defensively. “Now can we please just get what we need outta that damn book and get out of here?”

Malcolm still looks entirely too entertained, helping himself to a seat in the creaky rolling chair next to the cluttered desk. 

“What are we even doing here, Bright?” JT is feeling frustrated, embarrassed, off-balance. “What the hell are you lookin’ for?”

“I had a hunch, that’s all.” The profiler shrugs, flipping through the binder like he’s hunting for something. “Just seeing if I’m right.”

“You’re lookin’ for an employee at a very specific, very expensive gay bar. I ain’t exactly a genius, but that sounds like a little more than a hunch.”

Malcolm makes a humming noise, now completely immersed in the thick folder. 

Muttering curses under his breath, JT starts to pace and catches himself. He’s irritated, more at himself than at the profiler. He shouldn’t be so on edge here, shouldn’t be so stupidly paranoid and reactive. 

The cop tries to be patient, god help him. He really tries. Wears circles around the small room and doesn’t even realize he’s doing it until his ankle starts to throb, reminding him he popped his bones out of place not all that long ago and he’s still not back up to full-speed.

He jumps at the noise when Malcolm shuts the binder with a loud snap, glares at the kid who’s doing his best angelic impression.

“Well?” It comes off a little more snappish than he intends and he doesn’t have the composure to apologize.

“Dead end,” Malcolm says blankly.

The cop narrows his eyes at him. He can’t tell if the kid’s lying or not.

“I need to talk to a few more employees.” Bright is thinking out loud. “Just to cover our bases. You seemed awfully friendly with that bartender, so we could start there. How about a drink?”

Bright aims a blinding smile at the cop like a weapon, hops out of his chair and heads for the door. 

JT clenches his jaw, grinds his teeth until it hurts. Forces himself to take a long breath through his nose.

“Goddamit,” he huffs out as he watches Malcolm disappear through the swinging door, back out into the noise and chaos and hungry eyes. 

And because apparently this is it; this is his life now—chasing Bright’s trail of destruction around the city whether he wants to or not—he squares his shoulders and follows. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I might be past this writer's block... I hope? Anyways here's an update, and also I love you all so much. 
> 
> Thank you for encouraging me through my slump, you have no idea how much I needed that <3
> 
> Soooo much more to come!
> 
> .
> 
> Psssst, come visit your authors!
> 
> Brimel Discord Server:  
https://discord.gg/K6tqRws
> 
> prodigal son trash server:  
https://discord.gg/fDpyMQc


	15. Chapter Fifteen

JT has been in the closet for as long as he can remember. 

He hates that term. Hates even thinking it. Despises any possible reference or allusion to his own sexuality, or the idea that it’s something he needs to talk about at all. It’s nobody’s business. Private. Personal.

But it runs under the surface in a thousand countless ways, just hanging there. Waiting, unwilling to let him bury it entirely. And he dodges and avoids and procrastinates and makes excuses, like taking the stairs because you don’t want to risk making small talk in the elevator. 

He’s stubborn so he’s good at that. Looking the other way, distracting himself. Taking the stairs. 

It’s no-one’s life to live but his, or so he tells himself repeatedly as he skirts the edges of his own discomfort and finds any possible excuse not to take a harder look.

One way or another, it’s a part of himself he’s never really had to face head-on. 

Not until he’s 18 and lanky in baggy BDU’s, fresh off the boat. Squinting in the Afghan sun for the first time. Sitting in the back of a grumbling transport truck in the desert on the way to his first duty station with a rifle between his knees. 

He’ll never forget what it felt like to study the faces of strangers. Soldiers he knew he might have to die beside. Meeting Mikey’s eyes for the first time, bright green and reflecting little glints of color like sunlight. He won’t forget—can’t forget—feeling his stomach  _ lurch _ like hitting that sudden drop on a rollercoaster. The funny thing that jumped in his chest the very first time those eyes landed on his and he realized... 

_ Oh shit I’m done for.  _

Like all good things, that ended. Abruptly. Violently. Ripped out of him whole, leaving a void like an old scab he kept picking at to see if it would still bleed. It did.

And he shoved it all away. Packed it into cardboard boxes to hide in the attic, waiting to gather dust and die with him. Thinks he should have guessed it would never be that easy, because now it’s all coming up again. Not just the renewed pain of learning to care for someone, deep and bruising like growing pains... 

Now he has to think of everything else, too. About how everyone in his life will react if they hear about it. 

Or maybe he doesn’t have to. But he does. All the time.

It’s all too easy to imagine the shadowed looks and snide comments he’s sure to earn from his coworkers, the same ones he’s seen them aim at others so many times. Sneers and stares and cruel jokes in the locker rooms, because cop work isn’t exactly known for its tolerance. It’s like the military in that regard, and myabe JT hid behind that too. In a world where everything is strict and black and white, so clearly taboo, it’s easy to hide from it. Easy to tell yourself you have a good excuse for doing it, too. He doesn’t have to face something he’s not allowed to face.

It’s all coming back up now.

Now, for some reason he’s trying to imagine how the conversation would go if he had to tell Gil about him and Bright. Wondering how he’d take it, if he’d be angry or disappointed or both. If maybe the old man would fire them both on the spot just to avoid dealing with the whole mess.

He thinks about telling Dani, because they work together for chrissakes. She’d have to know. At least she’d laugh, or get that smug glint in her eyes and leave him with a self-righteous  _ I told you so _ and he’d pretend to be irritated and life would go on.

He thinks about telling his mom. 

That one sends his heart straight through the floor. Chokes him up, stops him right in his tracks, because she doesn’t know. Doesn’t even suspect as far as he’s aware, and seeing the disappointment in her eyes would kill him. His entire life has been built on being strong for her. For his sister, for a family left reeling and struggling and broken and so goddamn alone.

It doesn’t help that when she calls on the weekends, just like she has every weekend for years, she unfailingly asks him if there’s a  _ new lady in his life. _ A question that always makes him shake his head and grin.

“No, ma,” he answers with a sigh of long-suffering. “Been busy with work, I ain’t got time for dating right now.”

Like clockwork the conversation goes back and forth. Always some slight variation of the same thing. A familiar script. 

The excuses fall out easier every time. He’s always too busy, too tired, run too ragged. Anything and everything to keep it all at arm’s length. 

He makes a routine of visiting his mom’s old place in Harlem. Not nearly as often as he’d like, but he makes the time at all costs. Only sees his baby sister every other month or so anymore, but that’s to be expected. She has her own family, her own kids, her own life. A successful career to boot.

JT’s caught himself envying her more than once. He still isn’t sure how she does it: balances everything like that. He wonders if he’ll be able to do the same someday or if he’ll just procrastinate until he retires, gray and alone. 

Maybe a little selfishly too, he was waiting. Waiting for the world to change, or for himself to. For some kind of light to shine out of the sky like a sign from above, dispelling doubt and shame and everything else holding him back.

Waiting for everything to become a little more tolerant, a little more patient, a little more relaxed and caring. All the things he wants for himself but is still too stubborn to reach for. 

Grasping for something new means relaxing his white-knuckled grip on the  _ familiar,  _ on the here and now. On the old and rotting things festering inside him like old leftovers he can’t throw out.

But it’s here now. As always, life has a funny way of crashing in when you least expect it. When you’re least ready.

If there’s any goddamn way to be  _ ready _ for somebody like Malcolm Bright.

.

  
  


They spend too much time at the bar for JT’s taste, and at a certain point he just retreats to the corner to sulk and nurse his beer and try not to look as out of place as he feels. It’s loud and crowded and the lights are flashing and he despises every dirty inch of the place.

Malcolm doesn’t seem to share the same social shyness, even if maybe he should. He makes quick friends with the same bartender JT was rude to earlier in the night, showing him the picture on his phone—he assumes it’s Grezny—and talks with him in animated tones for what feels like hours. 

Checking his watch, JT scowls when he realizes it’s only been about twenty minutes.

The bartender is all too happy to entertain the profiler, his flirting becoming more and more obvious as he enjoys Bright’s rapt attention. Of course, Malcolm is oblivious.

JT watches the exchange, absolutely flummoxed.

It’s insane to him that the kid can see literally everything, can reach into the mind of a total stranger and pull out childhood traumas, buried secrets and sordid affairs like it’s nothing… but he somehow can’t see this. Can’t see a guy with all the tact of a freight train trying his best to get in his pants. 

As ridiculous as the whole thing is, it somehow works for the profiler. The club staff are interested and helpful, because of course they are. Because it’s easy to be helpful when you’ve got a face like Malcolm’s standing in front of you, smiling and alert and hanging on your every word. 

JT is torn between watching the trainwreck unfold and tearing his eyes away, because that ugly, stupid little spark of jealousy in his gut has now blossomed into a full blown inferno. He wasn’t prepared for it in the slightest, hasn’t experienced anything like it in so long. It catches him off guard. Leaves him reeling.

He considers himself a confident person. Tough, resilient. Things roll off and fall away and he doesn’t lose sleep at night.

So why is this so different?

.

  
  


“I need a shower,” JT grumbles as they trudge back into Bright’s apartment, the early morning glow creeping in through cold-fogged glass.

Hours. He spent  _ hours _ playing bodyguard at that stupid club. Making himself about as useful as a potted plant, except even less somehow because at least plants produce oxygen and all the cop did was burn through it. 

In fact he almost gave up entirely, strongly considered heading out to the car to try to catch a cat nap in the driver’s seat. He just as quickly reminded himself that he wasn’t exactly in the mindset to trust Bright not to do anything stupid unattended.

JT tries to tell himself it’s everyone else he doesn’t trust. Bouncers and bartenders and drunk patrons looking for a hookup. But that’s not entirely true, either.

“Help yourself,” Malcolm buzzes away, already occupied with something the cop’s sleep-deprived mind can’t keep up with.

JT wasn’t expecting that offer, but the more he thinks about it, he thinks it might be weirder to make up an excuse to go back to his own place. Not that he won’t end up there eventually, but he’s not in a rush.

_ Okay, no big deal,  _ JT tells himself. _ Just showering at a friend’s apartment.  _

_ A friend you made out with _ , his brain reminds him unhelpfully.  _ Had “the talk” with; got insanely jealous just watching at a strip club. _

He showers quickly, trying not to give his brain too much time to wander. Helps himself to some expensive-looking shampoo and bodywash. Changes back into his old clothes because they’re not exactly dirty and he doesn’t have another set with him. Being in any state of undress here, even for practical reasons, still feels oddly… wrong. Dirty somehow. 

When he wanders back out to the living room, drying his short hair on a towel softer than anyone has a right to own, he hears the sound of a phone from somewhere near the kitchen. Malcolm is listening to a voicemail from the sound of things. 

The cop listens, trying to place a voice that’s oddly familiar. He can’t exactly make out all the words but he hears “my boy” plain as day and if that doesn’t wake him right up nothing will.

“Who is that?” He steps forward and interrupts, because as tempting as it is to eavesdrop he’s not the type. Doesn’t want to break the uneasy trust they’ve only just started building, still fragile. Bending under the weight of everything they’re asking it to carry.

Malcolm jumps, looking guilty for reasons JT can’t figure out. He hits the button on his phone until it goes silent.

“Was that your dad?” JT doesn’t give him room to make up an excuse because he can hear it coming. “He’s still calling you?”

Malcolm looks miserable and ashamed and drops his eyes away. “Yeah, that’s kind of his thing.”

JT feels like he got hit in the gut. How did he forget about this? He remembers all too clearly how distracted and miserable the kid was only a few weeks ago, losing sleep and appetite because his father wouldn’t stop harassing him.

It’s still happening, he realizes. It’s been happening this entire time, maybe even while Malcolm was in the hospital.

“How often does he call?” He forces his voice into something resembling calm. Isn’t sure if it works.

“Oh, you know the usual. Every hour on the hour.” Malcolm twists his phone in his hands and slumps against the wall. Rubs at his eyes with shaky hands. 

“Shit.” JT steps closer and pauses, unsure what he can do, how he can help. 

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

JT drops his hand, bunching up the damp towel in a clenched fist.

“What does he want?” 

He feels all wrong here, like he’s intruding. A day or two ago he would have thought this was none of his business, a private family matter he has no right poking his nose into.

Now it all feels different. Like it’s important that he offers Malcolm a shoulder to lean on while he’s clearly stressed out of his brain. Even if that shoulder is awkward and mostly unhelpful, riddled with uncertainty.

Malcolm drags tired eyes up, shadowed and haunted. “He wants me to come see him. At Claremont.”   
  


“But... You’re not going to do that.” JT hears it come out like a question, because of course he wants to believe Malcolm’s smart enough to stay away from his toxic father, especially while he’s like this. Fragile, compromised, distracted. Recovering from a near-death experience and knee-deep in a dozen other things.

But then again, this is Bright they’re talking about.

“He insists he can help with the case.” Malcolm makes an attempt to smile, and it twists his face up into something all strangled and alien. “Which is kind of ironic, considering he doesn’t know the first thing about what we’re working on.”

That answers that, at least. It’s relieving to know the Surgeon isn’t privy to what they’ve been up to, because of all the people who feel dangerous in their lives right now Martin is right up there with Grezny and their unknown suspect. 

“Just tell me you’re not going,” JT demands quietly, less than a step between them now. “I need to hear you say it.”

“Of course not.” Bright shrugs it off like it’s a ridiculous thing to suggest, which should be comforting but instead makes the cop feel even more uneasy. “He just… keeps calling.”

“Can’t block his number, or don’t want to?” JT isn’t entirely sure he wants to hear that answer. But he does want to understand, even if it’s a lot to wrap his head around. Messy, complicated, layers of history and heartache. 

“It’s a private number.” 

A non-answer; they both know it would be easy enough for Bright to silence his phone. Send unknown numbers straight to voicemail, ignore the messages as they pour in.

“Well either way, I don’t think we’re quite that desperate.” JT goes for a joke and hears it fall flat.

Malcolm just stands there, leaning against the wall, all but curled in on himself and looking impossibly small. He doesn’t look at the cop.

JT wants so badly to reach out, to touch. To offer Malcolm something when he has nothing to offer. Maybe even a hug, which is a strange enough urge in itself that it keeps him frozen, staying put so he doesn’t accidentally make everything worse with his bumbling good intentions. He doesn’t even know if Malcolm would welcome that kind of familiarity right now. For all he knows, maybe the kid just needs his space.

That’s it, he thinks. They’ve been all crowded up in each other’s bubble for weeks now. Neither of them has had so much as a second to breathe. Riding off the mutual trauma and toxic coping mechanisms that’s kept them huddled together for warmth, sinking into each other’s presence without stopping to wonder if that’s a good thing. If it’s healthy.

“Look,” JT forces himself to say, wondering why it’s so difficult. “Just… turn your phone off and get some sleep. We’ll pick this back up later, make a battle plan huh?”

Malcolm nods, the movement exaggerated like he’s trying to force himself to agree. He seems heartened that the cop is the one taking the initiative this time, planning the next step in their covert investigative adventure.

JT tries to suffocate the uneasiness prickling at his skin as he grabs his jacket, pulls on his shoes.

“And in case it needs to be said? That battle plan ain’t gonna include anymore strip clubs.”

**.**

JT drives home in a tired haze, but his brain is spinning. He wonders if this is how Malcolm feels all the time: wired and chaotic. Always playing catch-up with his own thoughts. Snatching at little bits of information and trying to cram them into place, sort out the relevant from the extraneous before they dissolve entirely.

What is Malcolm hiding from him? It’s a question that’s eating at him like a bad meal, sitting heavy in his gut, twisting him up. Going still and quiet for a few minutes at a time before growling to life again.

He can’t shrug the weight off his shoulders. The crushing worry for someone who isn’t  _ him _ , and he isn’t equipped to handle that kind of divided attention. It’s been so long since he had someone else occupying his brain like this, driving him to think too much and do things he never would have considered a year ago. To ask himself crazy questions like—

_ Why the fuck is he lying to me? _

When he nails that down, it stings. Doesn’t Malcolm trust him? The kid certainly claims to; he kind of made a big deal out of it in fact. 

JT’s willing to look the other way on a lot of things here, and in fact already has. He’s let the profiler drag them halfway across the city and back hunting down every hare-brained theory he can conjure up. 

He didn’t ask questions about the case files, because it’s weird enough the kid has copies of them in the first place, weird that he had the foresight to know they’d even need them. But it’s all piling up. Bright’s reaction to hearing about Grezny’s tattoo. His mysterious “information gathering” mission at the strip club. 

Hell, ending up at a strip club in the first place is weird, because JT can’t exactly say he’s been giving this case his full attention, but he knows for damn sure that’s something Malcolm pulled right out of his ass without explanation. There’s nothing in the files that would even suggest they start looking in a place like that. Nothing in Grezny’s history, either.

Yeah, it’s definitely stacking up. It’s a mountain of bullshit piled so high he can’t even pretend not to see it anymore. 

JT thinks he needs to confront him. Doesn’t see that he has much of a choice, when he puts all the pieces together and comes up with a giant question mark. 

Why would Malcolm be keeping part of the case from him? 

_ Because he knows you won’t like it. Won’t approve. You’ll try to stop him.  _

Malcolm is using him, the cop thinks as he scowls out through the windshield. It’s a strangely painful thought.

It’s not like they’re… well, anything. They’ve kissed once. Had a few awkward conversations. Malcolm really doesn’t owe him anything, and it’s JT’s fault for building up their relationship in his head as something it’s not.

JT’s been sitting there letting his imagination spiral off into stupid abstract impossibilities like how he’s ever going to out himself to his mama, when in reality, he may never have to worry about that. 

Because so far they haven’t so much as toed the threshold of anything more than awkward friendship, and Bright seems determined to make even that as difficult as possible. Because they bonded too deep, too fast in the dark when they thought it might be their last day on earth.

Because the bottom line is that Malcolm still doesn’t trust him.

Distracted and frowning at the road through tired eyes, he thinks so hard on the drive back he’s sure his ears are probably leaking smoke. Whatever way he turns it over, he can’t shake that niggling  _ wrong _ feeling. Can’t get it out of his head. 

He drives back to his apartment and pulls in under his assigned carport, where he sits with the engine running and his mind racing. 

JT’s always trusted his gut before, and it’s never led him wrong. Why is this any different?

“Get your shit together, asshole,” he tells himself sternly in the rearview mirror. “You do what you’ve gotta do.”

Clenching his jaw, the cop throws the shifter into gear and pulls back onto the street.

If he’s wrong about this, he can turn around and go home and get some sleep. Try to get the smell of alcohol and cologne out of his nostrils; the aroma of strip club sweat that’s still lingering in spite of the shower. 

JT pulls the address up on his phone and arrives at Claremont Psychiatric Hospital a little before the visiting hours listed on the website. He swallows as he stares up at the imposing red brick walls.

It’s all in his head, but the place seems ominous. Wrong.

He feeds the meter down the block and walks to the front entrance, sparing an awkward wave at the security guard squinting at him through the glass doors. His footsteps seem to fall hollow around him, muted and heavy. Like somebody’s got the sound turned down on a bad movie. 

The cop takes a seat on the stone ledge by the front doors, checks his watch. He has about ten minutes, and if he knows Bright—which he’s no longer sure he does—the kid won’t be able to wait.

If he shows up, it’ll be right on the dot. 

So he has ten minutes to just… sit there, and feel exhausted and stressed out and strangely guilty. 

He feels terrible. That he’s so convinced Bright is lying straight to his face that he actually showed up to catch him in the act. What kind of person does that make him?

It makes him a cop with a damn good gut instinct, he thinks to himself sourly as he watches a car pull up, a familiar figure in a dark coat step out at the curb. Bundle up his coat and set his shoulders against the wind.

JT stands with his hands in his pockets, blocking the entrance, and Bright doesn’t look up until he’s almost on top of him.

The kid pulls up short, surprise on his face. It’s quickly replaced by guilt.

“JT—” Malcolm starts, and the cop can almost hear the bullshit that’s about to come spewing out of his mouth.

“You lied to me,” the cop interjects flatly. Hoping he doesn’t sound quite as pissed off as he feels.

Malcolm swallows and shuts his mouth. He stands there in the sharp wind, just staring at him, and JT can’t bring himself to care this time.

He’s angry. Beyond angry, he’s hurt, and enraged at himself for allowing someone else to inflict an emotion like that on him. He’s scared too, because he’s seen Malcolm throw himself into the proverbial jaws of death time and time again like he doesn’t care if he ever comes out the other side. 

JT cares. He cares enough for them both, and maybe seeing Martin wouldn’t kill the profiler, but he thinks it might have just as dramatic an effect.

“Why?” He growls, taking a step forward. 

It’s both irritating and impressive that Malcolm doesn’t back down, though it looks like he wants to.

“I knew you’d try to stop me.”

“You’re goddamn right I would,” JT feels the acid leeching into his voice. Doesn’t have the energy to stop it. He takes another step forward, until there’s only a foot or so between their bodies. “Was it worth it? Lying?”

Malcolm casts his eyes down, dark eyelashes fluttering as he stares at the pavement. “Almost never,” he admits.

“Good thing you’re a terrible liar, then.” 

JT can’t imagine the alternative. Knowing Malcolm would have come here anyways after looking him straight in the eyes and promising not to. Knowing that if he hadn’t trusted his instincts, he would be home asleep right now with no clue what the kid was up to. 

“You’re not up to this.” He tries logic first, knowing as he says it that it’s just wasted energy. Wasted words. “You just got out of the hospital. I mean, christ you’re barely keepin’ your feet.”

“I’m fine!” Malcolm leans back and shrugs his hands inside his jacket pockets, looking exasperated. “That was ages ago.”

“Less than two weeks,” JT corrects him darkly. 

“Okay, fine. What are you going to do?” Malcolm challenges. “Drag me back to the car kicking and screaming?”

“Don’t tempt me.” JT flashes a glare at him, thinking it might not be all that difficult to just throw the kid over his shoulder and haul him out of there after all. 

Not that it would do either of them much good.

He knows Malcolm is still being self-destructive for reasons he can’t possibly understand. Thinks that he’s not yet enough to balance that out, to bring the kid tilting back towards normalcy and rationality with the rest of them.

“I’m going in.”

JT grinds his jaw and tries not to snap. “It’s not worth it, Bright. This isn’t worth it.”

“Yeah, well I’ll be the judge of that,” Malcolm spits venomously, shouldering past JT to get to the door. “Anyways, it’s none of your business.”

It takes everything in the cop’s willpower not to try to stop him, to grab his arm and physically throw him out of the last place he should be right now. To shake him by the shoulders and rant in his face that  _ yes _ , this has become very much his goddamn business.

Instead, JT follows. Strides right up behind Malcolm to the reception desk where the kid is checking in and ignoring him entirely.

“NYPD,” he says from behind Malcolm’s shoulder as he flashes his badge. “We’re here on business.”

He makes eye contact when Bright turns darting eyes on him, challenging him to protest. To make a scene and fight him on this, because if he’s being honest, JT is more than up to the task right about now.

JT gives the receptionist his best version of a strained smile, gesturing to the visitor’s pass.

“We’ll take two of those.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for your patience guys, oof. My job pretty much kicked me in the balls last week, so yeah that's my best excuse... sorry? I love you all and I'm always so overjoyed to hear from you <3


	16. Chapter Sixteen

JT follows Malcolm into the bowels of Claremont, the visitor’s sticker tucked into his jacket pocket because he’s not about to peel it off and slap it on his shirt like some kind of simpering tourist. 

The place is massive, sturdy and old. Planted in the heart of the city like it’s grown roots there. The halls are still dark in the early hours of the morning, corridors eerie and too clean. Abnormally wide and colorless, and JT’s overactive imagination thinks maybe that’s so they can walk the prisoners past each other with minimal contact, keeping distance. The patients—prisoners—are wearing drab gray uniforms or bright orange ones, not the crisp white he expected.

Maybe that was his mistake. Expecting. He was thinking of video game settings and movie scenes, Leonard Dicaprio in Shutter Island or some shit. Creepy visuals and zombie-like patients, maybe. Not the oppressive, haunted air. The shadows and muted noises. He’s creeped out by the whole vibe and it’s getting into his head like a cheesy B-flick waiting for a jump scare.

Malcolm seems to know where he’s going, and he walks there with measured steps. Grim-faced, lines pulling at his mouth like he’s walking to his own funeral.

Between the unfamiliar scenario and dealing with his own residual anger, JT figures it’s best to keep his mouth shut for as long as possible. He isn’t sure why he’s here—besides the fact they’re apparently both stubborn enough to play this game of chicken until they die—but he’s confident he needs to be. That this isn’t something he should have let Malcolm do. Not alone, not at all. 

JT thinks it might not be too late to turn back, in fact, if he can think of something to say. Can think of a way to bridge the frustration and defensiveness between them right now and get through to the kid, get it through his head that this is a horrible, no good, _ very bad fucking idea _. 

By the time he’s halfway through coming up with a viable plan to make that happen, it’s too late. They’re standing in front of a heavy door, which buzzes as an old man in a guard uniform lets them inside. Past him is a long hallway and an antechamber leading into Martin’s cell.

Cell is maybe a strong word for it. It’s more like a luxury holding room, if that room was built by a doomsday prepper who also dabbled in the study of medicine and collected old books. It’s lighter in here, the air cleaner. 

There’s a rolling cart with a television on it parked by a wingback chair, playing recaps of last night’s news reel. JT recognizes Malcolm’s sister on the screen in brief glimpses and soundbites, discussing the bomb scare at Reichman, postulating wildly about the implications of the NYPD keeping news of a bomber from the public. With that kind of context, it makes a little more sense why Martin Whitly has been harassing his son day and night. 

It’s a little disconcerting, to see that the man responsible for so much suffering has been living in luxury like this. Space to roam. Almost limitless freedom to read and write, to watch television and have visitors and wear comfortable sweaters.

And that’s him. The Surgeon.

JT wasn’t sure what he was imagining, but from the stories he’s heard, the notoriety and horror, he was expecting someone a little more… intimidating.

Martin is all smiles in a white cardigan, his salt-and-pepper hair glowing like a halo in beams of early-morning sunlight. He looks healthy and well-fed, a glimmer of sharp intelligence flickering in his eyes. It’s the only familiar thing about him. 

“My boy,” he says fondly as Malcolm enters. “You came.” The surgeon tilts his head in curiosity, eyes on JT as the cop follows. “And you brought a friend.”

Malcolm throws an uneasy look over his shoulder, making eye contact for a millisecond before pulling his gaze away. 

JT stands close to the profiler, unsure what he can do in this scenario but feeling the need to be there anyways. The argument of moments before is all but forgotten in the face of a new threat.

And the cop isn’t sugarcoating that one. Martin is a threat. 

The air feels thick. Stifled. Hanging between Malcolm and his father like poison. JT is seized by the irrational feeling that he’ll suffocate if he tries to breathe it in. 

“You asked to see me. Demanded, more like.” Malcolm’s voice is tight and strained, his words clipped. 

The kid is wearing his stress like a heavy coat. His spine is ramrod-straight, hands at his side and clenched into fists. There are decades of history hanging between the two men, loaded and tangible. Crushing. 

“Can’t a father miss his own son?” Martin doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, ambling towards his desk. 

He’s still _ smiling _, that calculated expression of amusement and control. It makes the cop’s skin crawl. 

JT thinks that he didn’t really get it before. The sway this man held over so many people. The media, his patients, his own family. It’s coming into focus a little better now. It’s nothing he can pin down or put into words, just an aura. A gut feeling. Instinct. 

“Oh, right. You just wanted to chat. Catch up on old times.” 

The sarcasm in Malcolm’s voice would be comforting under any other circumstances. A reminder that even here, bending almost physically under the weight of his father’s presence, he’s still the same old Bright. 

“Exactly.” Martin’s eyes flash.

He’s a puppetmaster, JT can’t help but think. Setting up an elaborate production for his own entertainment. Dangling the world on the end of a string to get what he wants, consequences be damned. 

Whitly’s wearing a jumpsuit under his cardigan; he’s trapped here, chained and shackled in a cage. In the face of all that, he’s a man who’s completely and utterly in control. 

“But I really didn’t think you’d show up like _ this _.” Martin spreads his hands like a peace offering, squinting and tilting his head. “Have you seen a mirror lately; you look like death—”

“That’s enough,” Malcolm tries to interject. 

“The bruises are fading but they’re indicative of a possible sphenoid fracture, and of course you’re favoring your left side. What the hell happened?”

JT hates the way Martin just steamrolls him, because Malcolm isn’t a pushover. Isn’t weak and doesn’t cave to people like this. 

Standing here in front of his own father, it’s like the profiler is a different person entirely. Smaller. Brittle bones tied together with fishing line, waiting on a nudge to fall apart.

“It’s none of your concern,” Bright tries again, and he makes it sound stronger this time. It’s almost convincing.

“On the contrary, I’m very concerned. Is your partner not taking good enough care of you?”

It’s too easy. Low hanging fruit. So, not aimed at Malcolm then. It’s a jab at the cop, fishing for a reaction. Testing the waters. Circling him with his words like a predator, poking and prodding to see what will get a rise out of him. 

Martin raises an eyebrow when he gets nothing back, his lips twitching like he’s enjoying what he’s seeing. “Then again, he’s not exactly in tip-top shape himself, is he?” A pointed glance down at the brace on JT’s ankle. “Looks like neither of you are very good at taking care of the other.”

“I’m going to leave,” Malcolm finally chokes out. A warning and a promise.

The cop hides his grimace, wondering why Malcolm couldn’t let that slide. Between the two of them, JT hardly thinks he’s the one who needs defending. 

“No you’re not.” Martin shrugs, his chains rattling like jewelry. “You don’t have what you came for.”

“What did I come for? Besides your stupid games.”

“Answers. You’re working a case, aren’t you? And judging by that look on your face, I’d say you’re running out of leads.”

“Not quite.” Malcolm stands up a little straighter, raises his chin. “I’m tracking something down.”

Without thinking it through, JT shoots the profiler an incredulous look. Calling their strip club shenanigans a lead seems like a bit of a stretch. 

“Your _ partner _ doesn’t seem to have too much faith in that. Whatever it is.”

The profiler looks briefly startled, glancing over like he only just remembered the other man was present. 

“Didn’t say that,” JT defends himself quickly. He’s not about to let Martin get in his head. Bright’s either. He turns his attention on the Surgeon, stepping forward.

“Look. We’ve had a long week, busting our asses while you just been sittin’ here on yours. If you’ve got something, why don’t you spill it. Otherwise you’re just wasting our time.”

Martin doesn’t look as thoughtful about that as the cop was hoping he would. Instead he seems delighted, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he slowly stands with that creepy smile growing wider. 

“And what’s in it for me?”  
  


“Absolutely nothin’.” JT shakes his head, shrugging. “We’re just gonna walk outta here either way, talk or don’t. No skin off my teeth.”

Martin turns his head to the side without breaking eye contact, laughs. “Oh I like this one, Malcolm. You should keep him.”

The words make JT’s gut twist a little, because he knows what they’re intended to do. They’re carefully designed to pull that pained look across Malcolm’s face, to send his eyes skittering down at the floor in shadowed shame. 

Hoping the muscle working in his jaw isn’t as obvious as it feels, JT raises his hands out from his sides, patience dwindling. “So, what’s it gonna be?”

Martin stares at him too long. Studying. He’s doing the same thing Malcolm does, except instead of curiosity and wonder there’s nothing. Just a lifeless lens taking in information, processing it. Spitting out algorithms and formulas.

Whatever he sees, it seems to satisfy him, at least for a moment. He turns away, pacing slowly back towards his desk.

“I’ve been following that case on the news, the Reichman killer. I assume that’s what you’re working on, what’s got you all tied up in knots?” Whitly makes a gesture with his hands, eyes sliding across for a reaction neither of his visitors are willing to give him.

Undaunted, he presses on.

“Nasty stuff, really. Amatuer job of course, but there are some interesting little details. Hooks to really pull you in and make you wonder… how on earth did this Grezny fellow get away with all this by himself?”

Bright is still trying not to react. JT can see that much. He’s doing his damndest to hold his shoulders up and keep his face blank. It’s not working. And if JT can read him like a fucking book, he can only imagine what Martin’s doing. 

“Unless he isn’t.” Martin makes a show of it, because it’s all a show. Just a parade for the cameras, magic tricks for the crowd. “Unless… there’s somebody else?”

“I’m not discussing the case with you,” Bright finally gets up the nerve to say. Doesn’t sound remotely like he means it.

“But that’s why you came. Since you’re not here to catch up, as you put it. Besides, I can help. Don’t let your pride get in the way, son, not with so many people counting on you. I _ want _ to help.”

“You’ve been locked in here for twenty years,” Malcolm says, his jaw clenched, his voice half-broken. “What could you possibly have?”

Martin steps closer to his son, toeing the edge of the red line. His tether pulls tight behind him. 

JT bites his tongue and resists the urge to pull Malcolm back. Hopefully the kid knows what he’s doing. Hopefully his own father wouldn’t actually harm him. Physically, anyways.

“If you really didn’t need my help… then why did you walk through that door?” A question to answer a question. An endless circular loop of riddles and manipulation.

JT wants to scream in frustration, wants to grab Martin Whitly by the collar of that stupid sweater and shake him senseless. Punish him for the pain he’s put so many people through over the course of his twisted life. The pain he seems all too-willing to continue inflicting.

Malcolm’s jaw twitches. His eyes are exhausted and cold as steel. He stares at his father like a challenge, pain and rage funneling into heated silence.

JT finds himself holding his breath. Waiting for thin ice to crack and shatter and plunge them all into darkness. 

Martin shrugs, pulling a face like he’s all too happy to carry on this one-sided conversion on his own. He pauses dramatically, brows crinkling in a facsimile of revelation. 

“You know, I did see an old friend of yours on the television.” It’s casual. Too casual, too calm. Too much of a subject change to be a subject change at all. “He’s looking good, I must say. Seems to have done very well for himself.”

Malcolm’s face goes pale. Whatever he was expecting his father to say, it clearly wasn’t that.

“You’ve seen him too, I take it. Doesn’t look like he’s aged a day…. I wonder what his skincare routine is.”

The cop is close enough to Malcolm to hear the shaky breath that escapes his lips. A single sound, almost lost in the still air.

JT gets ready to step in. He isn’t sure what’s happening, but every bone in his body is warning him that this is wrong. All wrong. Martin looks far too delighted, Malcolm too shaken. Something is passing between the two men that JT can’t interpret, and he’s not willing to stay an impassive observer while Martin hones his lifelong hobby of fucking with his son’s mind. 

“C’mon,” JT mutters quietly, grabbing Malcolm’s shoulder and pulling him back towards the door. He thinks he’s seen enough, more than enough. The profiler doesn’t even seem to notice the touch.

“That’s it?” Malcolm bites out, voice cracking as he pulls weakly against JT’s grip. “That’s all you had?”

“Well, you already had it yourself. All the pieces, just waiting to be arranged.” Martin looks unashamed, shrugging. “That, and I just wanted to see you.”

Malcolm glares, turning away in disgust to pound on the door for the guard. 

“Don’t go yet,” Martin protests, his chain rattling in the stillness as he makes an attempt to pull against it. “You only just got here! And I still need to hear more about your special friend—”

“Hey,” JT snaps, thrusting an accusing finger towards Martin. “Don’t push it.”

Martin Whitly is nothing if not persistent, still talking, still rambling poisonous words into the thick air as the guard arrives on the other side of the door and starts to unlock it.

“You’d think the NYPD would have kept a tighter lid on this, wouldn’t you? Makes you wonder how the media found out so many little details. Who leaked it in the first place.” Martin’s raising his voice, like he can somehow force Malcolm to hear him. To listen. 

Thankfully, the kid has found his focus again—or at least some shadowy semblance of it—and JT hears him let out a harsh breath like the air gets easier to breathe as the door cracks.

“Thank you,” Malcolm mutters to the guard as he pushes through, passing him a handful of cash. “Don’t tell mother?”

The older man nods once and pockets the money, leaving JT more confused than ever as he tries to sort out just what kind of arrangement the Whitly family has going on here. He figures that’s a puzzle for another time.

All he knows for now is that Martin’s very presence is enough to make his skin crawl and he can’t get Malcolm out of there quickly enough.

Stepping out of that ominous corridor feels like breaking the surface after too long underwater. Even the gloom and grey shadows seem welcoming now in contrast to the tension-charged atmosphere of the cell behind them.

The profiler doesn’t pause, his strides long and a bit unsteady as he heads back the way they came and JT follows. 

The cop is torn between spinning Malcolm around and demanding answers right there in the hallway or getting him out of there as quickly as possible. He goes with option two, because as much as he hates to admit it, he thinks the encounter with the infamous Surgeon rattled him a little more than he expected it to.

The air outside is frigid, the wind sharp enough to curl into their clothes. 

“Come on.” JT nudges Bright’s elbow, nods down the street. “Car.” 

Malcolm doesn’t protest. Doesn’t say anything in fact, just hunches his shoulders against the wind and follows the cop. For once, JT is more than willing to use his size advantage as a shield, buffering the smaller man as they trek down the sidewalk. 

Once in the jeep—and isn’t this becoming just a little bit too familiar?—JT rushes to crank up the heater, holding numbed fingers over the vents as the engine roars to life. 

He feels his muscles relax, his tightly clenched jaw going slack as the stress bleeds out of him in a more familiar environment. 

Silence hangs between them, loaded with all the things that have passed between them over the past several hours. It feels too much like they’ve lived a year in a single night. 

“Christ,” the cop finally says aloud. “I ain’t smoked in ten years but I’ll be damned if I don’t need a cigarette after that.”

“I’ve never smoked,” Malcolm volunteers distantly.

JT does a double take. “What, like, ever?”

“Ever.” Malcolm fakes a smile, catches the cop’s eye, and it becomes a real one. “Sheltered, I know.”

“Well…” JT sucks on his lip and stares out the window. “That’s like, a rite of passage. I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who’s never tried it. Like at least once, in high school or whatever.”

Malcolm shifts in his seat, raises an eyebrow. There’s a glint of mischief to his eyes. 

“Quick Stop down the block.”

“You serious?” JT looks at him dubiously, thinking it’s the lightest the kid has looked in weeks. Even if it’s just temporary, a bandaid of surface-level emotion. 

If Malcolm is getting some small spark out of joy out of living in the moment, well. JT isn’t about to ruin that for him. 

Malcolm nods hard, like he’s working hard to distract them both from what just transpired. “Detective Tarmel, I hereby give you permission to corrupt me.”

The cop’s mind goes blank for a moment, because he’s a grown ass man but he’s not immune to pale skin and blue eyes and soft lips, not when he knows what they taste like. 

“Let’s, uh. Let’s just start with a cigarette.”

“Don’t you have to buy them by the pack?”

“We’re gonna buy a pack. Then we each take one and hand the rest off to a drifter. And that’s gonna be your tobacco experience. One and done.”

**.**

  
  


And that’s how JT finds himself standing with Malcolm Bright on the rooftop of the kid’s apartment, the city growing lighter through the overcast gloom, the chilled air cutting through their jackets. A single cigarette in each hand and a lighter to share.

As he lights one up and passes it across into pale, shaking fingers, he wonders if he’s a bad influence on the younger man or if Bright’s a good enough influence on him that he finally notices it. Wonders if those two factors will ever swing into the right balance.

It’s strange that it came to this. That they’re here, the anger hanging between them from their argument earlier dispelled as the stress and anxiety drains out of them. All because they were too stubborn to ask for help. From each other; from anyone.

He’s tired, he thinks blankly as he takes his first full draw of nicotine in well over a decade. Sapped, body and mind. He feels his eyes flutter shut against the wind and tilts his chin up to meet it. 

They stand there, silent in mutual exhaustion, minds working in sluggish overdrive through the haze.

“Who was he talking about?” JT finally asks, turning his head to see if Malcolm reacts. He asks because he has to ask. Because he can’t keep pretending he doesn’t notice the little things. Can’t keep playing dumb and letting things slide.

The profiler stands in the cold like he doesn’t feel it, his eyes a million miles away. 

“Someone I used to know,” Malcolm finally says, his voice so hollow and quiet that the cop might not even have heard him if he wasn’t looking right at him. “A long time ago.”

That doesn’t tell him anything, JT thinks. Not a goddamn thing. 

He doesn’t want to push Bright to talk, not now. Not yet. After seeing how much the confrontation with his father took out of him, JT’s willing to let sleeping dogs lie for a little while longer.

He stares at the kid, watches him raise the cigarette to his lips with shaky fingers and take a drag that doesn’t sit right. Watching Bright smoke feels wrong. Out of place. JT hopes it doesn’t become a habit.

Then again, he doubts there’s any danger of that. Malcolm grimaces and lets the cigarette fall.

JT’s too exhausted to even make a jab, small talk spiraling away. He’s content to stand there, sharing company in the cold, replaying all the strange moments and unconscious decisions that led them to this one. 

It starts to snow. 

It comes slowly, catching them both by surprise. 

Malcolm blinks up at the sky, drifting flakes catching on his eyelashes. He lets out a long breath, tips his head back and raises his arms slightly. Just soaking it in. Looking like a work of art in a wool coat, a half-burned cigarette hanging from outstretched fingers.

JT watches Malcolm, feels something loosening in his chest like a fist he’s kept clenched for too long. Reluctantly unfolding. Painful as the feeling rushes back in static pinpricks. Relief and agony and all the things he doesn’t let himself look at too closely on dark nights alone. 

Half the time he can’t figure out why he’s drawn into Malcolm’s gravity, a satellite circling the earth in utter stillness. The other half, he’s just amazed that he was able to resist it as long as he did. 

This time, this single frozen moment, falls into the latter category. 

The cop reaches forward, strangely reluctant to break the spell. Takes the smoldering cigarette from Malcolm’s hand before he drops it, lets it fall to the pavement and crushes it to ash beneath his boot. 

The light brush of skin on skin, however brief, seems to bring the kid back. Malcolm blinks his way out of his own head, like he just remembered JT is standing there with him. Looks at him for a long moment, and smiles. A too-open expression that says too much. His eyes shine an unearthly color in the overcast glow. 

“C’mon,” JT says quietly, jerking his head towards the stairwell. “You’re gonna freeze.”

Bright nods, licking his lips. He’s thinking too hard. He reaches out, half-halting like he’s unsure of himself, brushes the light powder of snow from JT’s shoulder. 

And it’s ridiculous, because it’s still falling, little white flakes of frost picking up pace with wind, but the cop finds he doesn’t mind at all. There’s a world of information, unspoken words and half-syllables written on Bright’s face, and JT’s never felt more frustrated that he can’t read it. Not well enough. 

Against his will, he’s reminded with sudden vivid clarity of how Malcolm’s lips tasted, their shared kiss in the apartment underneath them. It’s a moment his mind has replayed for him in living color countless times over the course of the past several days. It’s ironic that it comes upon him now, in a moment where he’s less distracted by lust and more by the overwhelming sense of protectiveness he feels in its stead. 

“Come on,” he urges again, thinking there’s no way the cold is doing good things for Bright’s still healing body, his thin shoulders hunched in his coat. “Let’s go back in.”

Malcolm catches his wrist as the cop turns to lead the way, halting him in his steps.

“Wait,” he breathes, and there’s a strange urgency to his tone.

JT obliges, watching Malcolm’s eyes move as he stares at nothing.

“I just—thank you,” it leaves his lungs in a rush, “for being there today.”

The cop feels his eyebrows furrowing in confusion, trying to figure out where this is coming from. He thinks he should shrug it off, but there’s something in the kid’s face that stops him. He wonders what Bright must think of him if he imagines for even a moment that JT would have ever let him go into that hospital alone. Angry or not.

Bright looks down, a look of realization and guilt flickering across his face. He quickly releases JT’s hand, his movements stiff like he’s not sure if he overstepped. Of how JT will react to the unsolicited touch.

He’s not sure why he does it, what comes over him in the moment. He just knows he can’t stand that uncertainty, that haunted, broken look in Malcolm’s eyes.

JT grabs the kid and pulls him close, into a crushing hug. Bright freezes for only a heartbeat, and then he grips him back. Holds onto him the way a drowning man reaches for a lifeline. Hides his face in the cop’s jacket like he’s perfectly content to die there, his hands twisted in the leather. He’s stronger than he looks. 

And JT doesn’t think about how strange it is, about how it might look to outside eyes. They’re sheltered from the world up here in the New York snow, a mocking mirror image of the way they were lost before underneath it all. Sharing pain and terror in the dark, linked in the most indescribable way. 

He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t try to offer empty words because he doesn’t have any to give. Just lets the kid hold onto him for as long as he needs to, and maybe he needs it too, been more touch-starved than he wants to admit to himself. He does his best to wrap the kid up, shield him from the cold he doesn’t even seem to register.

Whatever’s going on in Bright’s head, whatever demons he’s facing, and whether they crawl through his head in the middle of the night or sit in a leather chair in a hospital, it doesn’t matter. He’s not alone now. Doesn’t have to fight those battles by himself, strung out and exhausted. 

JT thinks all these things silently, wills them into Malcolm’s tortured mind as he holds him close and breathes in the smell of him. Lets his own walls down again, wonders when he built them back up in the first place. Wonders _ why, _ when so much has passed between them. 

For a brief, weightless moment, they’re the only two people that exist in the world. 

It might have been minutes or hours later, but eventually Bright sighs softly, his warm breath ghosting through JT’s shirt. The cop feels the kid’s desperate grip relax, hopes he finally fought down whatever storm was raging in his head. Even if it’s temporary. God knows the kid could use a break.

“Come inside with me,” he mutters into Bright’s hair, sharply conscious of how easy it would be to get lost in that smell. “Please?”

The kid nods against his chest, seems reluctant to pull away. He’s not the only one. 

But it’s snowing, coming down in drifting waves as the wind slowly picks up and the temperature dips. There’s a dusting of colorless crystals hanging in Malcolm’s hair, and JT automatically reaches up to brush them away. It’s a ghost of Malcolm’s awkward moment earlier, and the profiler smiles tightly as he seems to register that. 

JT doesn’t let go of him, keeping one big arm slung protectively over his thin shoulders as he guides him back towards the stairwell. Releases him long enough to make it in after him as the door creaks open. 

It’s been a long night, a long morning. A long day full of tension and heartache. But it’s not over yet, not by a long shot.

It’s time they finally talked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *awkward wave*
> 
> Your eyes do not deceive you. This is, in fact, an update.
> 
> I can't make any promises about the speed of future updates, but I can assure you that this story has not and will not be abandoned. At the moment it's suffering because of my absolutely stupid work schedule, which first imploded because of all this Corona bullshit, and now continues to get worse because of everything else going on in the world. I'll leave it at that; it's been a nightmare.
> 
> I love you all, and I think about you guys all the time. I hope some of you are still around. I miss you guys and I miss writing, and I'm not giving up hope that I can keep writing whenever I have the time.
> 
> Lastly, this chapter is dedicated to my baby Jay, who has become a beautiful little light in my dark life these days <3


	17. Chapter Seventeen

The air is warm inside the apartment, thick enough to hitch in his lungs as the cop guides them down the stairs.

JT thinks about making something hot to drink, or scavenging together some food in the gloomy apartment. Maybe turning on a light or two to make the place feel warmer. More life-like. Inhabited and tangible. 

He finds in the long run that he doesn’t have the energy for any of that, and apparently neither does Malcolm.

They sink into their now-familiar perches, JT on the coffee table and Malcolm swallowed up by the overstuffed couch cushions. The profiler looks small sitting there, holding his coat across his knees and mindlessly running long fingers over the wool. He looks tired.

The wind picks up in the snow outside and the windows rattle.

JT didn’t realize how cold he’d become until the heat starts seeping into his bones, chilling at first and then almost painful. He shrugs out of his own coat and sets it on the table beside him, shaking out his shoulders with a fraction of his usual energy. 

There’s a weary calm between them, settling where frustration and uncertainty used to be. JT knows an hour or two ago he felt angry and hurt and immeasurably terrified, but he also knows he doesn’t feel any of that now. Not anymore.

For some reason, it comes as a surprise when Malcolm is the first to break the silence.

“I hate cigarettes.”

Despite himself, despite how worn out and worn down he is, JT hears himself laugh. A soft sound in the quiet.

“Good,” he says with a smile. “Let’s keep it that way.”

He’s relieved that they have this. An easiness and familiarity to fall back on after riding their emotional roller coaster. A comfortable middle ground where they can forget the conflict and tension for a moment or two. And these days, it really does seem to come only a moment at a time.

For once, they don’t have a plan or a destination or a stakeout. They don’t even have the energy to try and cobble one together, to construct some kind of scheme or blueprint to make themselves feel like they’re being productive.

They’re just tired.

JT has so many questions. So many things he feels like he needs to say, and there’s no clear starting line, no ordered framework to any of it. He wants to pull Malcolm open at the seams, the way the profiler always manages to do to him so easily when the positions are reversed. 

But all he can think about is how fragile Malcolm looked in a bright cell full of books and golden sunlight. Fading out from the strong, brilliant force that JT’s come to care about and flickering back in time. A child in a man’s coat. Blue eyes and broken glass.

“Do you ever feel like... you got hurt. In your head somewhere,” Malcolm whispers, his eyes blank. “And it healed wrong, and there’s all this scar tissue... And nothing can grow over it or really change or heal, because it’s permanent. It’s who you are now.”

JT stares at the ground, tracing little lines and ridges with unfocused eyes and thinks he knows exactly what that feels like. Thinks he hasn’t felt anything else besides it in a long time. 

“Yeah,” he admits simply at last, surprising even himself. “I really thought life ruined me, y’know. Like this is it—all of this—” he gestures around them vaguely. “And I’m stuck as me. I don’t get to change or move on cause it all still lives up here.”

He taps two fingers against his forehead tiredly, lets his hand drop away because he doesn’t have the energy for more. To really channel all the guilt and self-loathing and senseless anger he’s been hauling around with him for so long.

“I saw how you were with your dad. What you said,” he soldiers on. “Not outright, but… between the lines. And I kinda get it. Like yeah, I’m still pissed you lied to me. But I know why you did it, too. It makes sense.”

“I shouldn’t have gone to see him.”

JT huffs out a scoff with no real weight to it, just a breathless acknowledgement of what they already knew. What he tried to tell the kid in the first place. Rubbing it in doesn’t really seem necessary anymore.

“What the hell do I do now?” Malcolm scrubs both hands over his face, groaning into his palms. 

The cop feels like he’s walking on a wire here, and he can see the other side but doesn’t know if he has the grace and balance to make it there. Delicate and impossible. His skin feels raw with the sheer weight of it all.

“Wish I had an easy answer for that one.” JT says it to the hardwood floor, his hands clasped tight between his knees. 

He finds himself wishing he’d spent more time healing, working on himself. Really putting in the effort to be a better man instead of wallowing in his own heartache for so many years. Thinks if he had, he might be better equipped to help Bright now. He might have some words of wisdom or better yet, an actual game plan. Solid steps and operative tasks, rungs to climb the ladder.

When it comes down to it they’re grasping onto each other like children, scared in the shadows. Not knowing what to do but taking comfort in the company. Terrified of a nameless monster in the dark. Guilty and drowning in it.

He’s not sure of much these days, but he knows he’s tired of feeling guilty.

“What if... we stopped arguing over whose fault it is and just agreed to forgive ourselves?” JT feels the words fall out before he can really think them through. 

Malcolm looks at him, startled. When his eyes are like that, all wide-open and bright, JT feels like he can look right into him. Past walls and shields and all the ways he tries to protect himself. 

“What if we just—let ourselves have this?” He’s thinking out loud, which isn’t something he’s used to. He figures it’s about time he wanders off the beaten path. 

“This—” Malcolm stutters to a halt, all uncertainty and loss. “Do people like us… do we get something like this?”

The words are simple but they cut, like too many internal battles chopped down to a single terrifying question. 

“I feel like I’ve done too many things the wrong way,” Malcolm is rambling on, his voice quiet. “I’ve made too many mistakes. I’ve hurt you.”

JT doesn’t have an answer for much these days, but he knows how to face that one. Neither of them have to spell it out to know exactly what they’re talking about. That massive raw wound, itching beneath the surface as it heals over and scars.

“I’m telling you for the last time, kid, I don’t blame you for anything that happened.” He shifts forward, looking Malcolm right in the eyes and trying to prove his own conviction with a glance.

“You blame yourself,” Malcolm says, and there’s a hint of that profiler always working, but there are a lot of other things in his voice too.

“You’re goddamn right.” JT presses his palms together until his forearms burn but won’t look away. “I blame myself for that, for a lot of things. But so do you.”

“I don’t know how to stop.”

“I think it starts with trust. You said before, you trust me don’t you?”

Malcolm’s face crumples, and he looks absolutely miserable but he nods anyways.

“Good. You still trust me?”

Malcolm nods again, and it’s a quicker response this time.

“Good,” the cop breathes out. “Good. I trust you too.”

“I lied to you. A lot.”

“I know you did,” JT shrugs. “And yeah that pisses me off, it really does. But I also know why you did it. I know it was comin’ from a good place. Maybe a stupid place, but I know you did it cause—well, cause you care about me.”

That’s more of a guess than anything, hope lingering at the edges of his mind that pushes him to say it. He knows he’s right because Malcolm’s eyes drop and fall away. So does a little bit of the heaviness sitting on the kid’s shoulders like a blanket. 

It feels relieving to hear it said out loud, to put it out there like a truth they’ve been dancing around too long. To finally pin a name on it.

“You ain’t gotta answer that. But you do have to promise me we’re past it. The lying and the protecting. Cause if it ain’t obvious, we’re really in this shit together. No going back now, not until we see it through.”

“No more lies,” Malcolm promises as he looks up. 

It’s less of a fight, less of a confrontation than JT was expecting. He leans back, staring at Malcolm and not hiding anything for once. Wondering when he turned into this person. Somebody able to crack open and talk like this, to be real without jokes or pretense. It’s wildly unfamiliar and more than a little uncomfortable. Vulnerable. 

“I’m going to try this again,” he says, newly emboldened. It feels like they’ve been pushing and pulling at each other for years, decades even. He’s sick of it. 

The cop rises to his feet, and he’s maybe as tired as he’s ever been but he feels lighter somehow. More confident.

He reaches down for Malcolm’s hand, and tries to hide the thrill that rushes through him when the kid doesn’t hesitate to take it.

“Try what?” Malcolm asks as he stands, but his pupils are blown wide in the dark so JT thinks he has an idea.

“I’m going to kiss you,” the cop says, stepping forward until he’s looming over the smaller man. Close enough that the air between them is warm. “If you’ll let me.”

“Honestly?” Malcolm looks up at him, his breathing shallow. “I’d rather you didn’t ask.”

That does funny things to JT too, because he’s not the kind of man to take something that isn’t freely given. But Malcolm does things to his gut, twists him up with need and lust and possession and a thousand other things he doesn’t have any business feeling.

He pauses there for a moment without touching, searching Malcolm’s face for any signs of doubt or fear. The profiler is looking back at him and there’s a challenge there, a glimpse of what JT saw the first time they were in this position. The endless push and pull.

He thinks he knows exactly what Malcolm wants. What he’s begging for. The unfamiliar and elusive. And since they’re in the business of honesty now, JT wants it too. Wants it bad enough he can barely see straight.

He brings both hands up and frames Malcolm’s face, letting his thumbs brush over sharp cheekbones, dark shadows under glacier-blue eyes. 

JT leans forward and kisses him like he wanted to the first time and didn’t know it. He presses his lips against impossibly soft ones, his eyes fluttering shut because the way they part to greet him is intoxicating. 

He feels Malcolm’s hands reach up to grip his wrists, drinks in the helpless little high-pitched sound that falls from those lips.

JT sucks on a swollen bottom lip, lets his tongue dart out to trace the edges and curves. Malcolm surges forward and JT grips him hard as their tongues battle for dominance, tipping the kid’s skull up for better access.

When he pulls back they’re both flushed and panting. JT can feel a racing pulse under his fingers, rubs little circles into pale skin. 

“I don’t think anybody’s ever kissed me like that,” the profiler breathes out like he can’t get enough air. His eyes are almost black in the shadows. 

“That’s a shame,” JT murmurs, staring down in awe at that face. “Think they missed out on something.”

A flash of self-consciousness lights up blue eyes, but JT holds him there so he can’t look away. 

“You said you trust me,” he interrupts whatever voice Malcolm is hearing in his head. “So _trust_ _me_.”

Malcolm looks at him, a heartbreaking uncertainty in his eyes, and nods.

JT lets himself smile, a bare twitch of the lips. He thinks that it’s the first time in weeks, in years, that something feels like it’s going right. 

“We ain’t gotta fix anything overnight, alright?” JT stares down into blue eyes because he can’t get enough of them, and he doesn’t have to pretend otherwise anymore. “We just… don’t have to fuck anything else up, either.”

“I like the sound of that,” Malcolm shrugs one shoulder, and he’s clearly still feeling vulnerable but covering it well. “But, you know… I do that a lot. Mess things up. I hurt people… I hurt myself.”   
  


“Not anymore,” JT shakes his head, feels a real grin splitting his cheeks. Warm and unfamiliar. “Now you’ve got a bodyguard.”

“That’s, ah. Kinda hot actually—”

JT shuts him up with a kiss.

.

They fall asleep on the couch.

JT is too exhausted, his head filled with cotton and his limbs sluggish, to remember how they ended up there. He only knows that he wakes up with Malcolm’s back pressed against his chest and his arms locked around the kid tight. 

It’s surreal enough that he could write it all off as a strange dream, if he tried. He could blink his heavy eyelids a time or two and drift back into it in a heartbeat. 

Instead he zeroes in on the way Malcolm is twitching restlessly, his arms jerking like a puppet with cut strings. His head tossing against JT’s chest. The cop’s still half-awake but he’s fairly certain that if this was a dream, chronic nightmares certainly wouldn’t make an appearance.

He’s not sure why he does it but he tightens his grip reflexively. There’s something in him that never woke up before, not for as long as he can remember, that would do anything for the man in his arms. Something dark and primal that lives in his chest. The protective instinct that’s always driven him, all wrapped up now in contradictions and need.

That part of him, almost unrecognizable now that he’s dug it up, feels too much. Too deep. Wants more than he’s supposed to have. 

He’s senselessly disappointed that he isn’t enough to help, to soothe Malcolm in all the ways the kid really needs so he can sleep. To rest safe, to feel peace. It’s ridiculous because this isn’t something JT can protect him from. It’s not a physical threat but an age-old terror burrowed into the profiler’s brain, and logically the cop knows that. He  _ knows. _

And he knows that waking up with a warm body in his arms, feeling tender and unfamiliar sensations like  _ happiness  _ and something suspiciously like real contentment, is maybe the most heartbreaking and beautiful thing he’s ever experienced. 

“I got you,” he hears himself say in a sleep-thick voice against chestnut hair. “You’re okay.”

Malcolm can’t hear him, out cold. Dead to the world. He knows that, too, but maybe it helps. Bright twitches weakly in his sleep and finally stills, relaxing against JT’s arms.

“I got you,” JT whispers again, feeling his eyes slide shut against his will.

He can’t help but wish desperately for Malcolm to feel the same warmth and peace JT feels in the semi-gloom. The first time his brain’s gone still in years. Boneless and relaxed and half-awake.

JT lets his chin fall forward into soft hair and feels himself drift.

**.**

The next time he wakes up, it’s dark. There’s a blanket thrown over him and a noticeable absence where Malcolm once pressed against him.

He sits up quickly, blinking the sleep from his eyes as his brain jump-starts. There’s a single light on in the kitchen, and he leans one arm over the couch as he stares at the hunched finger leaning over the counter. Tries to reconcile the bleary half-memories spinning through his head with what he’s seeing. 

“You okay?” He asks it without thinking, his voice scratchy and raw with disuse.

Malcolm’s head darts up, sharp blue eyes blinking back at him in surprise.

“You’re awake,” the kid smiles by way of answer. It’s open and real, unbalancing. Intimate.

JT’s heart flips at the sight. 

He clears his throat to hide his reaction, scrubbing a heavy palm over his eyes as he struggles to sit up fully. 

“Yeah,” he nods back, trying hard to shake himself loose from the lingering pull of slumber. “Guess I really knocked out.”

“You needed it.”

JT struggles free of the single blanket that might as well be quicksand and stands gracelessly, still feeling heavy and disconnected. Whether that’s from too much sleep or not enough is hard to tell.

Bright is watching him with an expression that’s hard to read, standing there in bare feet and sweatpants too big for his hips. His hair is still hanging, tussled and neglected like putting himself back together has completely slipped the kid’s mind with everything else on his plate.

JT thinks he’s the most goddamn beautiful thing he’s ever seen. 

He shuffles forward and wraps Malcolm up in his arms without thinking twice about it, enveloping cold limbs in his own sleep-warmed chest. Feels his lungs tightening suspiciously at the way the kid grips him back. It’s easy to think he could nod off again right there on the kid’s shoulder. Forget about murder and heartache and bombs going off in the dark. 

Malcolm doesn’t say anything, and he holds onto the cop’s shoulders so tight that it’s hard to pull away. Too hard.

“What’re you working on,” the cop finally asks to fill the silence, clearing his throat. Still trying to blink the sleep away. Still trying to shake that fuzzy warmth building in his chest.

Malcolm relaxes his grip and turns to the counter, where the photos and files from the now-familiar folder are spread out like a bloody mosaic across the marble. There’s a legal pad crowded with cramped black writing in front of the barstool, the news playing on his phone at low volume. He shuts it off and taps a pen against his notepad.

“Well, I think…. We need to track down who leaked the bomber angle,” he says with a note of distraction, like he’s already forgotten all about what he’s been working on for hours. “It could be a misdirect.”

“Could’a been someone in the NYPD,” JT grunts, his eyes scanning the scattered photos. He’s sure there’s a method to Bright’s madness in there somewhere, but it’s nothing he can track. “Bored cop. Or a dumb one.”

“Maybe.” Malcolm doesn’t sound convinced.

“Or?” JT raises his eyebrows.

Malcolm looks up at him, a humorless grin tugging at his mouth briefly and falling off. “Or someone who’d rather we spend our time and energy tracking down a violent radical instead of a sadistic killer.” 

“Suspect number two,” the cop takes a guess. If he’s being honest, he was following Malcolm’s steel conviction about this second mystery suspect with a good-humored faith tinged in doubt. Until now. Now, the pieces seem to be falling into place in a pattern even he can recognize.

The kid doesn’t reply aloud, but his lips press into a thin line as he stares down at his indecipherable notes.

“Doesn’t your sister work for a news station?” 

“She does. I can tell you now she’s not going to want to give up that kind of information.”

“I don’t know,” JT tilts his head innocently. “Far as I’ve seen, you can be pretty convincing when you put your mind to it.”

It takes a moment, maybe for the double-meaning to really sink in, but when it does it spreads across Malcolm’s cheeks like wildfire. For an illogical moment, JT is tempted to say  _ to hell with the damn case _ and just kiss him again.

“There’s more,” Malcolm says with a sheepish grin. “It was on the 5 o’clock news, but I didn’t want to wake you up…”

JT doesn’t much like the sound of that.

“Now they’re saying the bomb squad’s at Reichman, and well... They found something.”

JT’s brain stutters. “They found actual explosives... at the warehouse.”

“That’s the buzz on the news,” Malcolm sighs, heaving himself up onto the barstool with a wince the cop doesn’t miss. In the dim light, JT can just make out the ghostly edge of the faded bruise on the kid’s jaw. Another harsh reminder of what they lived through not so long ago.

It’s enough to wake him up again, a caffeine deprivation headache building at the base of his skull.

He finds his phone still in his back pocket, low on battery. Punches the “call” button on Dani’s name with a little more force than strictly necessary and listens to the line ring with a frown. 

“He lives,” she jokes as she answers. There’s a flurry of noise in the background as she speaks, and a voice that sounds suspiciously like Gil’s.

“Why didn’t you tell me they found explosives at Reichman,” he demands without preamble.

She pauses for a beat, and even through the phone he thinks he can hear her rolling her eyes. “I’m fine, thanks for asking,” she drawls out.

JT breathes out through his nose and rubs his forehead.

“First of all,” Dani’s voice sounds disapproving as she rattles on. “It was another anonymous tip, and the bombs weren’t even armed. Looks like whoever was setting them up got interrupted, so there’s that.”

“And second?”

“Second, why the hell are you even thinking about work right now?” She’s definitely scolding him. “You’re getting paid to do  _ literally nothing _ . What is wrong with you?”

JT doesn’t know how to start answering that one. 

“You should be half-tossed on your ass at Billymark’s, or hanging out at a strip club or something. And definitely not watching the news, asshole.”

The cop huffs, wondering how she’d react if he mentioned that his nightly activities have, in fact, included pit-stops at a strip club. “Can’t drink on leave,” he retorts half-heartedly. 

“Can’t drink, or can’t stop? Seriously, you need to take a load off.”

“So the bomb squad is back at Reichman,” JT presses sourly, unwilling to let her derail the conversation from that little detail. “I can’t believe this is the first I’m hearing about this.”

Dani swears unintelligibly, and Gil’s voice gets louder in the background. There’s a crackle of noise and static as the phone switches hands.

“JT!” Gil sounds happy to hear from him, at least. “I stopped by your apartment earlier but I guess you weren’t in. Left a six pack by the door for you.”

JT winces. “Must’a caught me while I was at the gym,” he lies unconvincingly. “Thanks for the thought, I guess.”

“Why aren’t you drunk already?” Gil unknowingly echoes Dani’s earlier sentiment.

“Gil,” JT warns. “Come on.”

“Get your nose outta PD business for a few days. Shit, kid.” 

“I’m a little invested in this one, strangely enough.” JT turns, hands on his hips, and catches Malcolm watching him with a bemused expression. The cop shakes his head in exasperation.

“Trust me, I get it.” Gil still sounds more upbeat than he has any right to be given the circumstances. “I’ve been in your shoes more than a few times in my years, alright? Trust me, you’ll be better for it. Get some rest, okay?”

“Lieutenant,” JT tries to protest, recognizing that the conversation is about to end whether he likes it or not. “Just tell me what you found.  _ Please. _ ”

Maybe it’s the note of desperation in his voice, the firsthand knowledge of how it feels to be on leave, restless, driving himself crazy with questions. 

“Half a dozen devices on the basement level,” Gil caves with a note of finality. “Looks like Grezny’s work. Maybe a little more sophisticated than what we found in his apartment, but close enough. Guess he was planning to take the place down after all.”   
  


JT files that away, wondering how hard the team is working on finding a second bomber. A second killer. Down two of their members, he doubts they have much to work with.

Gil is still distracted, pulling the phone away to talk to someone else before returning his attention to his nosey detective. “Now for fuck’s sake Tarmel, go watch the game and have a beer. Forget about bein’ a cop for a night or two, alright? And go get your blood pressure checked.”

JT opens his mouth to ask for more, to dig for details, but he already knows he’s fighting a losing battle. Gil won’t let him get another word in edgewise. 

“Look, I gotta go. I’ll text this weekend and see where you’re at, stop by if I can. Now take care of yourself. That’s an order.”

And just like that the phone line clicks, and JT is left staring into space with his phone in his hand.

“That didn’t sound very informative,” Malcolm remarks unnecessarily from his seat at the counter.

“What gave it away?” JT doesn’t have the energy for much more than sarcasm as he pockets his phone and grits his teeth. 

“Ainsley’s not answering texts,” the kid volunteers into the quiet. 

“Busy, or ignoring you?” 

“Definitely option two.”

“We need to get back to work,” JT groans out his frustration, dropping his elbows onto the countertop and rubbing at his face hard. “This is bullshit.”

“Yes—back to work. Excellent idea.” Malcolm spins his stool around, back to the mess on the counter. “We need to find out what this was—” he picks up the gruesome photo of the first victim’s mutilated back, the missing swatch of mutilated skin bright red on white. “What was important enough that they felt the need to remove it?”

“I  _ meant  _ back to the office. We need to have access to the database at the station.” He thinks Malcolm knew exactly what he meant, but the kid is back to moving a mile a minute. 

“If we can get an idea of what it was, we can identify our second suspect. I’m sure of it,” Bright buzzes on. “Whoever did this must have known that leaving it would be enough to tell us who this man was, and in turn who the killer is.” 

“We don’t have access to any of the lab reports,” JT thinks it’s redundant to point that out. “Even if they get a hit, we ain’t gonna be hearing about it.”

“I have another idea,” Malcolm says innocently. “But you’re not gonna like it.”

“Turns out I don’t like most of your ideas.” It’s an understatement if ever there was one. “I still go along with ‘em, for some reason.”

“Grezny’s apartment.” Malcolm pushes his notes away with an air of finality. “We need to get back in, take another look. We have a better idea of what we’re looking for now.”

JT scoffs incredulously. “And how the hell are we getting in there? It’s still a crime scene.”

“Maybe it’s time to get creative.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh look, another chapter. Maybe I'm *back* back? Time will tell.
> 
> More kisses making an appearance just for @prodigalsanyo 
> 
> I'm thrilled that so many of you are still reading, honestly. Every single person who left a note for me on the last chapter, especially after my inexcusable and unplanned hiatus: you made this chapter happen.
> 
> More whump to come, promise <3 And more chapters, hopefully sooner than later!


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